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Gear Up Your Site For Social Media Marketing
By Deepak Dutta (c) 2007

The year 2006 saw the emergence of social media. If you are
engaged in operating a website, you must realign your site to
exploit the popular social media sites for increased traffic.

You should also introduce social media components to your
site because web users are experiencing these new forms of
interactions on more and more sites and they may have an
expectation of the same from your site also.

If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to stay
longer, your focus this year should be on the social aspects
of your site.

Social media uses technologies like RSS, blogging, podcasting,
tagging, etc. and offers social networking (MySpace, Facebook),
social video and picture sharing (YouTube, Flickr), and
community-based content ranking (Digg, MiniClip) features.

The central theme of these sites is user generated content
used for sharing among the end-users. The social aspects of
these sites are to allow users to setup social communities,
invite friends and share common interests.

You don't have to change your site completely within a month or
so to take advantage of these new technologies. Introduce small
changes incrementally throughout the year and you will be on
your way to meet these new challenges.

The first step is to declare who you are to the online
community. People should be able to relate to you. Unless they
know more about you, you will be just an unknown identity and
most people don't like to deal with unknowns. Create an About
Us page and list your achievements and skills.

Create a MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/) page and link your
bio in the About Us page to the MySpace page. Also provide a
link back from the MySpace page to your website. Spend an hour
every week to develop your online social network in MySpace.
Invite a few of these new friends to write blog articles at
your site about your products or services.

Install free blog software and start publishing at least one
article in your blog. Provide an easy bookmarking feature to
social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/).
This is done by providing an action button for each article
on your site. The action button takes users to the submission
page of the bookmarking site.

Also, provide an action button for direct posting of blog
articles to Digg. Digg (http://www.digg.com/) is a popular
news ranking site. A well dugg article will bring thousands
of visitors to your site.

Provide a forum at your site for users to discuss your products
and services. Don't delete negative comments because they
provide insights into the improvements needed to serve your
visitors better. However, censor hate speeches and meaningless
bantering. Register your forum at BoardTracker. BoardTracker
(http://www.boardtracker.com/) is a forum search engine.

If you are offering products, allow users to review and rate
your products. This will help you in inventory management
because you may want to discontinue low rated products.

Provide RSS feeds for your new products, blogs, forum postings,
etc. An RSS feed provides teasers of your contents. Users will
use RSS readers to scan your teasers and visit your site for
more information if the teasers draw their attention.

Publish all your feeds at Feedburner (http://www.feedburner.com).
Feedburner provides media distribution and audience engagement
services for RSS feeds. They also provide an advertising network
for your feeds. If you have quality content, you will be able to
monetize your content using their services.

Create short how-to or new product videos and post these videos
in social video sharing sites like YouTube
(http://www.youtube.com/)and Google video
(http://video.google.com/). Provide a few start and end frames
in these videos to introduce your site with your site url. Post
these videos using catchy titles, teasing descriptions, and
appropriate tags to make them discoverable.

Provide embedded links to your posted videos on your site. This
will save your bandwidth and storage space because the videos
reside on the video sharing sites.

Besides videos, use social photo sharing sites like Flickr
(http://www.flickr.com/) to share pictures related to content
on your site. Use the same title, description and tag techniques
discussed earlier for social video sites.

Provide a Send to Friend feature for all products and services
you offer. This feature is a link that sends the article,
product description, etc. to a recipient via e-mail.

For starters, Yahoo provides a service called Action Buttons
(http://publisher.yahoo.com/social_media_tools/) that add links
to your website for users to share, save, and blog about your
website. The Yahoo action buttons use del.icio.us for social
bookmarking and the Yahoo blog site for blogging. It also has
a print feature.

Social media is not a fad. It is here to stay and bring in
profound changes to web surfers' experiences. It is the right
time for implementing features that will make your site social
media friendly. Also, using marketing techniques that utilize
popular social media sites, you will be able to bring traffic
to your site.
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Dr. Deepak Dutta is the creator of http://www.semanticbay.com -
an interactive social network website based on user shared text
and picture contents on any topics. His other website
http://www.classifiedsforfree.com - is one of the oldest online
classifieds sites where users can post ads in more than 600 US
cities and 60 countries.
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