Let’s be frank, no one really enjoys spring cleaning and coming to terms with what a hot mess your home has turned into during the winter, but sooner or later it must be done. The same goes for cleaning your electronic world. It’s time to cut the clutter. We will go over your inbox, the “friends” that you’ve accumulated and your LinkedIn.

First, let’s organize your email inbox. If you use Google mail, the biggest favor you can do for yourself is turn on the priority inbox setting, which will prioritize your emails in terms of what is most important to you. It’s an adjustable feature, and you can still view your normal inbox.

If you’re like most people who have more than one email account, you can make use of programs such as digsby that will manage all your addresses in one place as well as social media and instant messaging.

Once you’ve prioritized which emails are the most important and have cut out the junk you don’t need, you can start assessing which friends and followers you don’t need too. Social Media Today offers the following great quiz for clearing out your friend clutter:

+Of the Facebook friend requests that you’ve approved in the last six months, how many have you never seen or heard from again, aside from that initial contact?
+Have you bothered to say hello, or introduced yourself on their wall?
+How many of these new friends contact you only with a slew of requests to “like” their pages, or attend their webinars or launches?
+How many have disappeared altogether?

Be honest with yourself about who needs to go. Un-complicate your Twitter feed and your Facebook homepage by cutting out the clutter. You know who they are.

Finally, we can move into keeping all of your social media life organized. I recently covered this topic for our friends at Online Business Owners, and I listed a lot of great programs that you can utilize to be more efficient and successful in your online life. One area not covered in that post that I believe is important to tidy up is your LinkedIn. With more and more employers and business professionals using it to find potential employees and business partners, you can not afford to have your professional page be sloppy. Just remember, cut the clutter and keep it clean. Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) is a great phrase to live by.

I hope these tips help you tidy up your electronic life, and that you give yourself the gift of a fresh start this spring.

No matter is if you’re an SEO champion or a newbie, doing your research and learning new techniques to improving your content’s optimization is never a bad thing. Like many emerging medias, search engine optimization is neither something you can master in a day, nor is it a one-time affair.

To get to the optimum level of search engine optimization, a blogger has to understand everything from in-bound linking and proper content writing, to keyword use and tagging. Having a student mentality will help keep you ready to learn enough to be the Yoda of SEO.

These five blog posts will help you no matter what stage of the SEO game you’re at:

1.    SEO is not a one off event, it’s a continuous creative process by Mark Gibson

2.    The 3 Main Components of Search Engine Optimization by Cory Shanes

3.    SEO Tips, Tools, Plugins And Resources by Di Tesco at iBlogZone

4.    HOW TO: Optimize Your Content for Social Discovery by David Sasson at Mashable

5.    Ways of Optimizing Blogs in Search Engines by Erwin Felicilda

The construction and property sectors in the UK and how they’ve adapted to Social Media marketing.

The construction and property sectors have both had a pretty rough few years and it’s only because of the banking crisis and subsequent collapse of much of the world’s economies that I moved back to my marketing roots.  I’m very happy that I did, because Social Media has made the world of marketing a very exciting place to be, but it wasn’t through choice!

Since the Web 2.0 or digital and Social Media revolution changed how businesses approach their marketing, things have changed in many ways and even now, not everyone is fully aware of the very significant changes.  The construction and property sectors were always very dubious about intangibles like marketing anyway, and personally, I think that they are much happier with the phrase ‘business development’.  From my experience, most construction people are a bit too macho to get excited about marketing campaigns, Social Media or otherwise.

Urban renewal and regeneration

Many of us are aware that Social Media marketing is currently taking the business world by storm, but it is still not easy to convince a very skeptical and cautious construction sector.  It’s tough to convince them that Social Media is not that technical and it is not that hard to understand.  It seems to me that based on my conversations with the directors of some major construction companies, they consider Social Media to be as technically involved as IT.  We all know that even a medium sized company needs an IT department or at least an IT specialist on hand 24/7 and construction doesn’t like depending on people who speak a different language to them. From what I can see, construction managers and directors see Social Media experts, as the new people they’ll end up depending on and they’re not keen on that idea.

A traditional business

Certainly here in the UK, construction is a very traditional business and despite the radical changes in communication and marketing, the construction managers seem to prefer networking and relying on word of mouth, traditional direct marketing.  What they fail to realise is that many of their old contacts are no longer in business and things have changed dramatically.

Looking ahead to the future

About a year ago, I was dealing with a substantial list of industrial and commercial roofing material suppliers, many of whom were based in what’s left of the UK’s manufacturing industry.  I was carrying out some market research by telephone and asking these guys for their email addresses, they just laughed and proudly told me they did everything by fax!! I promise you this is 100% true!  I tried to explain how much quicker and more efficient email is and they wouldn’t listen, good job I didn’t mention Twitter!

So, no easy task convincing those guys about the benefits of Social Media connectivity!

Home builders are a little different and my favorite home builder is Miller Homes.  I have written many posts about Miller Homes and I know them very well.  One of their senior marketers commented on my Blog just yesterday, thanking me for my comprehensive coverage of their Social Media engagement.

Miller Homes: Social Media advocates

Award winning Miller Homes are really into Social Media marketing and they’re using it well!  They have a great website, they have well over 2,000 Twitter followers, they have a series of videos on YouTube, a YouTube TV channel, an active Facebook page and the Miller Homes Blog.  They continue to benefit from being ‘early adopters’ and I’m happy to see them thrive in the Social Media environment, it’s a great advert for Social Media marketing.

The Blogosphere

I know construction people, I’ve been project manager on residential sites and I’ve been responsible for £1,000,000′s of new build property, if you used words like ‘Blogosphere’, ‘Klout score’ and ‘Permission Marketing’ construction managers will treat you with either contempt or suspicion, or both.  Let’s face it, even before the Social Media revolution, construction managers weren’t that keen on traditional marketing, if I’d have mentioned ‘cognitive dissonance’ or SWOT analysis on site they’d have thought I was from another planet!  Forget the 5 or the 7 P’s!

Modernism

OK, we know the problem, but what’s the answer?  Based on recent experiences, I really believe that construction professionals need help, they’ve suffered a very hard few years and they simply cannot afford to keeping relying on traditional outdated marketing plans.  They can’t afford to!  The old methods don’t work like they used to!  It’s that simple!

The cost effective, reliable Twitter

Construction managers simply do not understand the way many Social Media platforms work, they think Twitter is for kids, for saying what’s for lunch and that Facebook’s for college kids, like in that movie!  However, one of the major construction companies here in the UK, Willmott Dixon recently Tweeted about it’s biggest contract ever, with the retail giant Tesco and the construction press picked up on the Tweet and the message became serious headlines!  What’s wrong with that??  Tell me that wasn’t cost effective!

I have also explained to construction managers that YouTube is a great marketing tool and they look at me as though I am crazy!  Look at this video and tell me it would capture a customer’s attention sent as a link!

Some construction managers aren’t even on LinkedIn!  I recently updated my LinkedIn account and was amazed to see all the great new features!  A lot of the construction and property managers I speak to think LinkedIn is where you go when you need a job!! These guys don’t ‘do‘ Social Media, while all the Social Media revolution was kicking off, they were trying to save their companies, they’ve not quite missed the party, but they need to be aware that it is still on and it’s a great party.

Here’s what they’re missing on LinkedIn!

Construction Marketing UK Ltd. Products and Services

(CLICK on the links for more information)

• Blog design and maintenance
• Marketing plans and strategies
• Social Media connectivity
• Website design and maintenance (CMS)
• Corporate video
• Twitter account design and maintenance
• Work wear and office wear, screen printing and embroidery
• Klout score connection and improvement
• Facebook business page design and maintenance
• Professional construction and property photography
• Screen printing and embroidery services (branding)
• Corporate branding
• Hi Viz and PPE

That is pretty comprehensive and what company wouldn’t want that kind of exposure to 100,000,000 other professionals??

That’s pretty much explained where the UK construction and property sectors are right now with Social Media and Social Media marketing!  Why not let me know how your company is coping with all the new developments, I’d really like to know!

If you want to know more about any aspect of marketing or Social Media marketing and branding, call Peter on 01473 435308 or email peter@constructionmarketinguk.co.uk

www.constructionmarketinguk.co.uk

We build the builders!

Just as quickly as it came, the ability to switch Facebook profiles to pages appears to be shut off.

Perhaps it was the negative press from websites such as Mashable and the apparent issues with the migrations that users were having that brought the new feature to a stop.

While this new feature was popular and helpful to some businesses, it became a social media nightmare for many users who did not fully grasp what they would be losing by changing over their pages. Some of the key complaints about the previous-profiles-turned-pages included:

-Loss of all content including messages, posts, photos, and even user names, which you can’t get back because FB already has it registered as being used;
-Other websites linked to your Facebook profile, such as Twitter and emails, no longer register your page;
-Friend-requesting people you know would only be identified as spam by Facebook, and there is almost no way to say otherwise without reporting the issue every time it happens; and finally,
-Third-party apps go buh-bye.

Overall, most of the reviews I read about the profile-to-page switch were negative, and the only way to fix it, since the change was irreversible, was to have an anonymous Facebook angel change it back for you.

I’ll be interested to see if Facebook brings the ability back to the platform with fresh improvements, or if it would rather not deal with the headache.

I don’t have more than 5,000 friends so it made no sense for me to switch over, but the KnownMedia team and I are interested in hearing more people’s thoughts on it. Did you migrate already? Tell us about your experience and what you thought about it.

With more than 89 million unique visitors and about 640 tweets per second, according to website-monitoring, Twitter is a lightning-fast way to communicate with your audiences.

You want to be sure that your time on Twitter is used correctly, so here I will share some tips and tricks to making your Twitter time more effective.

First, you need to find the right followers to engage with. Use “Find People” to find tweeters who are already your customers and follow them. Now, use Twitter Search to find who else would be a good follower. Search for your company, competitors, the type of organization or industry you are in, specific products, and what problems your customer might be looking for if they were going to use your product. For example, if you represented a spa or massage center, you might search for “pain,” “back pain,” or “body aches.”

Now that you have a group of followers, you have to listen, if you want to be heard. Don’t just jump in to Twitter and start spitting out content before you understand your audience and the conversation they are having. Use hashtags to look for what people are saying about you, your company and industry.

Twitter is very much about the mentality of listening and helping others, not just pushing your company or product at consumers. It is a conversing community, not a place for advertising space. A good rule to follow is listen 80 percent, Tweet 20 percent.

Once you have heard the conversation and understand your Twitter community, start interacting. Here are some best practices:

-  Be a human, not a robot. No one likes talking to automated answering services, and the same applies to social media. Be interactive and real with people.

-  Don’t say anything you don’t want EVERYONE to see. Unlike Facebook where you can have different levels of openness with your posts and comments, Twitter doesn’t have as many filters. Once you Tweet it, especially if you are a large, public company, they will see it.

-   Respond promptly in a professional way. This is pretty straight forward, but here is a good example of what not to do from United Airlines.

These are just a few Twitter tips from me, but there are a lot more out there. What are your tips and tricks for using Twitter?

Social book marking has become an extensive sea of websites on which to take note of and share websites that you find interesting. These sites allow users to keep track or, organize, search, share and manage their bookmarks online.

Websites such as StumbleUpon, Digg and Delicious have also become great tools for internet marketers because you can use them at every stage of a campaign. For example, you could conduct research about a specific topic and gain perspective about what consumers think about a brand by searching on reddit. Then you can post your website, article, blog post, etc. on to one or all of these page, which will give it more exposure higher SEO because of linking. Once you’ve posted the link, you can track its progress online by seeing how many “diggs” it received or how many people book marked it via Delicious.

While social book marking has lots of advantages, it is not without flaws. First, to get all of those back links and be able to track the links you post, you have to register on each website, and it can become very time consuming. Second, since social book marking can be done by anyone and everyone there is also an issue of non-expert opinions and incorrect tagging.

There are tons of social book-marking websites out on the web, but certain sites have broader reach than others, and each site appeals to a slightly different audience. Do your research and find out which websites house the target audience(s) you are looking for before devoting lots of energy to one website over another.

According to an article in eBizMBA, the most popular social book-marking websites include Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious and reddit. Here is a mini breakdown of some of these top players:

• Twitter- The micro-blogging site has more than 89 million unique monthly visitors, and by using Twitter search, you can find the people to follow who will matter most to the content you are book marking.
• Delicious- Often used for pages of educational, environmental or technological interest. For example “How to build a website” was one of the top bookmarks at time of this publication. Current and breaking news is also highly shared here.
• StumbleUpon- Used mostly for direct friend-to-friend social sharing based on personal interest. It is broken down into specific topic areas so your page is more likely to be tagged correctly by others.
• Digg- Ranked in second by eBizMBA for most popular social book-marking site, it is mostly used for current news and technology.
• Reddit- A more personal social book-marking website, reddit features many personal findings and strange happenings as well as news. This website has sub-pages of book marks including one titled “WTF.”

With changing times comes changing attitudes, as exemplified by the PGA Tour and its recent lifting of the ban on cell phones to embrace a social media campaign for the Cadillac Championship at Doral.

In a complete about-face of its former “no cell phone” policy, the PGA is diving head first into social media to engage its 30-and-under audience. Perhaps the tech-savvy fans and the guys holding up the “Quiet Please” signs can get along after all.

The campaign for the Cadillac Championship is broken down into pre-tournament and event-specific tactics, according to an article in the Chicago Tribune. Here is a break down of some of the things the PGA is doing to engage its younger audience:

• Participating tournament players Hunter Mahan and Justin Rose held a question-and-answer session on Twitter fans.

• Fans and social media followers of the tour are given clues in the Hide and Tweets to find the “Cadillac Championship Street Team,” which will be giving out tickets to the event, passes to a special after-hours area on the Blue Monster golf course and a chance to win a tee time at Doral.

• Similarly, fans will be given the same opportunity at Social Media Happy Hours, but for this tactic fans will be given advance notice about where and when to meet the team.

• All mobile devices are welcome on the grounds at the Blue Monster course, and Facebook and Twitter followers will be given free entry to a special SM Zone, which will be specifically for using your mobile device however you need to. In the Zone, fans and followers will also be able to buy upgraded tickets to the tournament, food and drinks.

The PGA is hoping that patrons of the tournament, those plugged-in to social media and average cell phone users alike, will still respect the players and the game. During a recent press conference, one of the tournament players asked people to “vibrate please.”

Do you think this is a step in the right direction for the PGA Tour? Are there other companies that you think should be embracing social media that haven’t yet? Let us know what you think.

I recently heard from a very young hip company that had hired a group to “handle” their social media for their new product.  The social media company’s contract was up for renewal and they were days away from well being fired.  This social media company told the client basically they did not know what they’re doing and leave it up to them because they will take care of it.  Now when the client asked questions they almost repeated this sentiment and they did not take any of their questions seriously.  In fact when the client asked questions about their new social media campaign and the social media group they hired was really annoyed repeating their mantra “You guys don’t know anything about this.  Don’t worry we’ll take care of this.” Could you imagine having an architect remodeling your house or a doctor handling your treatment and just saying “You don’t know anything about this so don’t worry about it.”

Now look I get it.  As a social media marketer the client usually doesn’t get it and we all have been faced with a surly executive that doesn’t believe in the value of social media.  Some social media professionals cannot convey quickly or assertively why this is imperative to incorporate social media.  For instance Twitter is the worlds new 1-800 customer service number where the sentiment about your latest customer experience is mini blogged for the world to see.  Let your client know this.

Let your client in on what is measurable and what is not.  An easy way is to print out an excel spreadsheet and show your client the latest sentiment analytical report.  It’s easy to do.  Check out socialmention and it is a easy way to start that conversation with a potential client or maintain good relations with a client.  Keep the interest of the client.  Break down what they need to know and what your current campaign hopes to bring.  We all know its trial and error when reaching out to potential customers.  Your enthusiasm and your conversation goes along way.

About the Author:
Francesca Alexander is a Content Marketer in Social Media. You can follow her on Twitter @GlobalGirl_LA

Links for blogs, both internal and external, is one of those basic skills that anyone jumping into the realm of developing SEO needs to understand. Let’s go over the vocabulary first. Internal links come from other websites to lead to your website or blog. External links, start from your website or blog and lead to others.

Both types of links function as increases to your SEO, unless you make some fatal errors. Here, I will take a look at what will help and possibly hurt you.

Firstly, these links are important because of the spider web nature of internet search engines. The spider web will catch you if you are linked to many different sites, especially those that are tightly tied into your keywords. Inbound links are especially helpful in this sense.

So how do you go about getting links to your website? The first essential trick comes from your content. Writing interesting content that people care about and that is engaging to your audience will make people in your social network want to link back to your website. Be interesting. Do your research. Make it worth your reader’s while.

Next, get your website or blog on some online directories and put as much information about your brand on those directories that you can. Link back to your website whenever possible, but don’t be excessive. This is probably the easiest thing you can do to help your SEO.

Another important part of improving your SEO with inbound links, just asks you to build relationships with those in your community. Find other blogs and websites that are relevant to your area of interest and start talking; you are in a community after all. Build up a reputation with these important places and pitch ideas for features or how you could be integrated with their content.

Now that you know what you should be doing, how about what not to do to get links. Avoid getting involved with buying mass quantities of links from online link farms, it looks sketchy and can be a red flag for search engines. Another bad practice is link-exchanging with random websites since you are never sure if they will uphold their end of the deal, and you also don’t know what type of business you are aligning yourself with. Lastly, don’t waste money on auto-linking software because they tend to look robotic and are marginally unpopular with search engines.

Now that you know the basics, what other ways have you seen useful in gaining links to your website?

Unless you have been living in a hole for the last few years, you know how extensive the influence of Facebook has become in the world of social media and marketing. With an estimated 650 million users around the world, you would be ill-fated for not paying attention the media power of the site.

One-quarter of all time spent on the internet in the U.S. is on Facebook, according to Michael Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media. Internet marketers know that there are potential customers and opportunities for buying in Facebook Land, and for the last year many have been trying the Facebook ad.

A recent study by Webtrends found that the price for Facebook ads is going up.

It costs about $1 per “Like” that companies want from each of their customers. This buys them the right to market to the fan base in the future for free and without having to ask for their email address like in the past. Additionally, these fans also provide you with feedback.

Despite these advantages, Webtrends also found that in the last year the percentage of people actually clicking on the ads went down from .06 to .05 percent.

Although advocates of the ads say that the price, which is expected to get higher in the future, is worth it to business owners, I have to wonder about it myself and if there is   another option. Turns out, there is.

In a recent post on Social Media List Machine, Cory Shanes talks about why smart business owners are making a move towards Facebook Groups to enhance their companies.

Through these groups, business owners have the ability to build a strong community and essentially a street team of people who will talk up your company to their friends.

The groups will act like a forum and share your business’s info in an open air fashion. This is also a great way to find solutions to your business’s problems and find solutions for your customers with other experts in your industry.

So while some say that the Facebook ad is the way to go to bring more fans to your company, there are other solutions available through the wide world of online marketing.