By Lyn Mettler

Tired of hearing about Google Plus and how it’s the latest and greatest place to be on social media? Well, we’ve got a new one for ya: Pinterest. It’s a good bet that by now you’ve received an email inviting you to this popular new invitation-only social network, but if you’ve never heard of it, it’s time to sit up and take note.

Last month, Pinterest cracked the top 10 most visited social networks at No. 9, besting the latest social media darling Google Plus at No. 10. Time magazine also declared it one of the top five social networks for 2011.

So what is this Pinterest? At its most basic, Pinterest allows you to create virtual “pinboards” with images you come across on the web. Your “pinboards” center around a specific subject matter or topic, say Arts & Crafts homes you’ve come across, purses you love, places you’d like to visit, birthday party ideas, decor for your baby’s nursery, you get the idea…

But it’s a whole lot more than that and the real reason I’m telling you about it is because of its potential to generate results for your business. Pinterest is a social network, of course, so for starters, you can follow others and their boards and vice versa.

Typically, the way a person uses Pinterest is they log on view pins (images) from those they follow, check out Pinterest’s recommended pins and search within the site for images specific to what they’re looking for. There is also a “pin” for your browser’s toolbar that you can click when you come across something on the web you’d like to “pin” to one of your boards.

When you pin an image, you can attach a web address to it and even a price. So if you’re a retailer who sells shoes, you might want to load up boards of your different styles of shoes and maybe even outfits that would go great with your shoes. Attach prices and websites to your products, and when Pinterest users come across your images, they just might go to your website and even better, purchase the product. On top of that, they may “repin” your image to one of their boards, thus sharing it with all of their followers.

We had a retail-based client who recently set up a Pinterest profile, and within days they saw a big bump in traffic from the site and even a boost in sales, better than they see from either Facebook or Twitter. We had another client with a women’s product who saw nearly 100 hits on their site from one pin someone posted of their product.

To get properly introduced to Pinterest, get on the site and play around. If you need an invite, shout and I’ll invite you from my profile. Feel free to take a look at Step Ahead’s Pinterest page at Pinterest.com/StepAheadInc/ to get a feel for what a company can do. It’s not a great fit for every business, but certainly those who offer something visually appealing should definitely poke around Pinterest. Have fun!

Lyn Mettler is the owner of Step Ahead Inc, an Indianapolis and Charleston, SC-based company specializing in social media management for business. Email her atlmettler@stepaheadinc.com for your Pinterest invite!

As a company who helps businesses maintain their Facebook pages, my team quickly did an in depth review of all the new features. Here’s a quick guide to the changes and how they will impact your company’s Facebook presence. Overall, it encourages more sharing and interaction, which should help elevate your page’s visibility, so long as you’re giving people content worth sharing. It’s no longer going to be enough to get customers to click “like” on your page; you’re going to have to keep them interested and active.

Newsfeed 

The newsfeed, the running list of friend activity that you see upon opening Facebook, got an overhaul with Top Stories now at the top. These stories are what Facebook thinks are of most interest to you and that have a lot of comments and “likes”. The downside is that you’ll now have to fight to get your way into Top Stories by giving your friends or “likers” something worth making a comment about. Additionally, as users, you can tweak what’s in the Top Stories by clicking on the top right of any post to hide the story or hide all posts from that page. You don’t want your friends to hide your posts because getting them to like your page will have become pointless. So keep your content interesting!

The Ticker

The ticker now runs at the top right of your screen and is a real time flow of all your friends’ actions. I like this because Facebook has taken all the inane stuff from the newsfeed, like accepting a friend request, “liking” links or making changes to your profile, and stuck it here. This helps the newsfeed be less cluttered with uninteresting junk (Farmville, anyone?). The ticker is also beneficial to business pages, because even if you don’t make it into the newsfeed you still have a chance to be here.

Smart Lists

In a direct swipe at Google +, Facebook has added the most popular feature from Google’s latest foray into social networking that it calls Smart Lists (Circles in Google+). Facebook has automatically created lists, such as Close Friends, Family, Business Colleagues, Indianapolis residents, etc. based on the information it has about you and who you interact with most. You can tweak who’s in these lists and choose to share content only with select groups.

Subscriptions

Very much like Twitter, on Facebook you can now “subscribe” to people without becoming their “friend.” This means you don’t have to mutually agree to connect, but rather you can follow someone’s Facebook content without them following you back. However, you don’t have to allow subscribers, but if you do (a great idea for journalists, public figures, politicians, musicians, etc.), go to your profile page, click Subscribers and opt in. Now anything that you post and choose the sharing option for Public will be shared with your subscribers. This can be a great tool for following top people in your industry, for PR people who want follow journalists, etc.

Gestures

In addition to “liking” something on Facebook, soon you will be able to say you are “listening” to a song on the music service Spotify, “watching” a movie on Netflix or Hulu or “reading” an article from the Washington Post. This new use of verbs will likely encourage more sharing of activity, again a good thing for business pages. The more you can get people to comment and share your activity the better likelihood you’ll show up in the newsfeed and get maximum views.

Timeline

Finally, Facebook is unrolling an entirely new profile page called Timeline, which Mark Zuckerberg says will serve as a scrapbook of your life. You can go back to the day you were born, note key moments with content, photos or video, and divide all this good stuff by year. Facebook will even pull out what it sees as major moments in your life since you joined Facebook. So far, it’s getting good reviews. Anything that gets more people to go on Facebook and to stay there longer is good for Facebook … and good for your business page.

Although many people are complaining about all the changes, I promise we’ll all get used to it. These are positive changes for Facebook and ultimately will make it a better tool for people and businesses.

http://www.insideindianabusiness.com/contributors.asp?id=2074

Lyn Mettler, from “Step Ahead Inc.”, an Indianapolis Company that manages social media for businesses, joined us on Daybreak Sunday to discuss the new Facebook changes.

Facebook’s new changes: wishtv.com

http://businessonmain.msn.com/browseresources/articles/brandandmarketingstrategies.aspx?cp-documentid=29575212&source=msnmoney#fbid=xNrFU-8PS_E

Businesses conduct informal surveys on Twitter all the time. They want to know what their customers think about the products or services they provide. Sometimes they want to let their current and pontential customers know about new products and services that will be available in the future. As noted in a previous post, that’s great when done in extreme moderation.

Several marketing and business experts participated in an email interview that led to the creation of the following list of Twitter marketing Dos and Don’ts:

DO – Address customer problems in real time. Be there whenever the customer or prospect may need you. If possible, even before they need you, said Lindy Moses, marketing associate for FabulousSavings.com. It’s all about being available.

DO – Use Twitter as a source of information for customers and prospects. Don’t just gather information from your followers for your market research projects. Share useful information, tips and links [that will help] your followers to see you as a credible source, said Holly Fisher, executive director for Charleston Step Ahead, Inc.

DO - Start by engaging people you already know. Find current clients, prospects and friends and have conversations with them, recommended Jeff Gibbard of True Voice Media, LLC.Acknowlege their content and participate in the community that emerges.

DON’T – Bombard your followers with your company’s brand messages. A big no-no is sending automated direct messages to everyone who follows the company, cautioned the director of marketing for Reach Local, Mike Merrill.

DON’T – Retweet yourself to the point of distraction. Over-targeting individuals through repeated use of the same messages or targeting and retargeting the individuals is as annoying as spam email or political flyers in your door, said Matt Van Hoven, the communications director for Skinny NYC.

Whether you use Twitter as a way to conduct informal surveys and market research, to engage with customers and prospects, or both, heeding the warnings and following the advice of those who have done it successfully could help you increase business and promote your company’s brand naturally.

As a partner in a business that manages social media accounts for companies across the country, I hear this phrase almost every single day from potential clients: “Yes, we like your approach, but it MUST produce a return on our investment.” And that’s understandable. As we all emerge from the recession, our dollars must be spent wisely and be tracked to sales. So we have fine-tuned our company’s approach to this ever-changing medium and would like to report that Yes, Virginia, you can make money via social media.

In its beginnings, social media was touted as a brand awareness tool and a “soft” way to reach your audience and it remains a valuable tool for that. With the right approach, however, you can take Facebook, Twitter, blogs and more beyond PR and marketing and into the realm of sales. Dell proved this when they announced that their Twitter accounts brought in some $6.5  million in sales. And so have we. In fact, we tracked more than $14,000 in direct bookings in January from Twitter and Facebook for a hotel group client. It can be done, folks, but how?

Here’s what you need to have in place to make social media profitable for your business:

1) A way to purchase your product or service online.

Sure, people can call to buy your product or come to your store, but social media is not going to be very successful at driving these types of sales. It means people have to go get their phone (assuming they’re not surfing the web on their smartphone) or remember to visit your store. Any extra work required by the user greatly diminishes the chances they’ll complete the transaction. We have learned people online are lazy. You want them to be able to click directly from the social media outlet to your site where the transaction occurs.

2) A way to track their path from social media through your website.

You need to have trackable URLs set up (we use Google’s URL Builder tool) and a good Analytics system, like the free Google Analytics, that will allow you to see how many people come from Facebook or Twitter to your website and how much they spend, what pages they visit, how long they stay, etc.

3) A consistent, conversational approach to social media.

This can be one of the toughest parts to master, and it requires being on social media every day, multiple times a day and understanding the right mix of conversation, information, entertainment and sales. You simply cannot come across as too sales driven on social media or you’ll lose your audience. Instead, focus 80% of your content on helpful, funny, engaging posts, while working in information about your products, services, packages, etc. in a very conversational manner. This requires studying which posts, at what times and on what days, result in the most interaction, views and sales and replicating that over time.

We’ve mastered the art of making money on social media for our clients, and with dedication and the right information, you can too.

Lyn Mettler is the founder and co-owner of Step Ahead, Inc., a company specializing in social media management, Internet marketing and public relations with offices in both Indianapolis and Charleston, S.C. She has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur magazine, SmartMoney.com and MSNBC.com for her advice on using social media successfully for business.

Lyn spoke for a second time with Mike Switzer, host of the daily South Carolina Business Review radio show on South Carolina public radio, about the latest trends in social media and reassured businesses they can be profitable with the right approach to social media. Listen to the 10- minute interview.

By Lyn Mettler

Have you “checked in” lately? If so, you’re part of a growing trend of sharing with your friends where you choose to go – be it a store, a restaurant, a hotel or an event – on a daily basis, a trend that I believe will shape the future of marketing with amazing potential to physically drive foot traffic to a particular place.

The so called “gurus” of social media have dubbed this trend “geo-location,” and it encompasses services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Loopt, Facebook Places, SCVNGR and more. It, along with “social buying” (guru translation: Groupon, Living Social, etc) were the social media up-and-comers in 2010, but get ready PR practitioners and marketers, because geo-location is going to hit mass appeal in 2011 and you’d better understand not just how it works, but how it can work for your company and clients.

So what do you need to know about geo-location beyond the basics? Here’s the latest and greatest shaping the location world:

1) Facebook entering the ranks with its Places offering earlier this year was a game changer. While its initial offering was fairly boring, lacking many of the fun game features of Foursquare and Gowalla, it upped the ante at the end of the year with “deals.” Deals allow you to get a discount or other deal at a store, restaurant, etc., much like you can with Foursquare, but guess what? Now you can publish the fact that you claimed the deal on Facebook, a network bigger than most countries, so all your friends can see it. Powerful free promotion for any business.

2) Gowalla also made a big, yet quiet, move at the end of the year. They integrated their product with Foursquare and Facebook, letting users “check in” using Gowalla while also “checking in” to Foursquare and Facebook Places. So folks who like all the services, but who were only going to “check in” using one, can now use Gowalla, much less popular than either Foursquare or Facebook, as their location tool of choice. I personally have switched to Gowalla for this reason and because I’ve always loved their layout. Now I can check in once with Gowalla, while also keeping up with my friends on Foursquare and Facebook.

3) While Foursquare has dominated geo-location, they’ve had a tough time keeping up with demand and providing their business customers all they’ve promised. That leaves the door open for someone else to step in and do a better job. Who? Possibly Gowalla based on No. 2, but there are some other contenders like Yelp and SCVNGR. What’s great about Yelp is it’s already packed with customer reviews of everything under the sun, so it’s a great resource when you’re checking in to a location to see what others have said about it. Its database of reviews is far more vast than any other tool, giving it a huge advantage. SCVNGR is also a fun tool that focuses more on the gaming aspects of geo-location and has gained appeal quickly with college students and Gen Ys.

So as you review that PR and marketing plan for 2011, consider giving geo-location a second look, making sure you’re taking advantage of its powerful ability to promote your offering and provide specials to drive people to your location. “Check in” and let me know how you make out.

The good: Powerful features, no cost at all. The bad: No support, occasional outages, no guarantee of future service. Here’s what you need to know about using Google Voice for your business.

Is Google Voice good enough to use for business? The answer is a resounding “yes” for Lyn Mettler, co-owner of Step Ahead, a social media marketing company. Mettler began using the service when she lived and ran her business in Charleston, S.C. At the time, she and her small staff worked out of their homes and Mettler wanted to eliminate her land line. But her cell phone, part of a plan shared among her family, had an Atlanta area code. She didn’t want to change mobile plans, but she did want her Charleston customers to have a local number where they could reach her. She signed up for Google Voice, which forwards calls to any number or numbers you wish.

The service became even more useful more recently, when she moved to Indianapolis. “Now my Charleston customers can still call me on a Charleston number, which makes them feel like I’m not so far away,” she says. “My Indianapolis customers call me on an Indianapolis number. And it all rings to the same phone.”

To her surprise, she also found Google Voice improved work flow. “What I like about it that I didn’t expect is that voicemail messages arrive in email.” That’s handy, since most customers call Mettler’s number with questions or concerns, and she hands them off to whichever team member is working on that project. Instead of having to compose an e-mail or have a conversation about the client’s question, she now simply forwards the phone message itself.

For Barry Greenstein, co-founder of bGreen lifestyle + building, Google Voice makes an all-mobile operation workable. bGreen sells environmentally friendly flooring and other building supplies, so it makes sense to have a mobile showroom — a refitted van –rather than a stationary office. Greenstein says he hasn’t had a land line in years — and in any case, without a traditional office, there was no place to install one. On the other hand, he didn’t want his business number to be recognizable as mobile, so he uses a Google Voice number instead. An added benefit is that voicemail messages go to both Greenstein and his business partner, so they get the same information at the same time

Powerful features

Anyone familiar with Google Voice knows that these are only a small portion of what the service can do. It also keeps a record of every incoming and outgoing call, text, and voicemail, lets users create special greetings for particular callers, allows for blocking specific numbers, call screening, and even for listening in on a caller’s voicemail and picking up mid-stream, among many others.

Its most-mocked feature is also the most unusual: Google Voice attempts to create a transcript of every voicemail, and sends that transcript as an e-mail and text message. Needless to say, errors are common — “Hi Minda” becomes “I’m in the” — for instance. But, flawed as they are, these transcripts can be hugely useful. “Ninety percent of the time, I don’t even listen to the message, because the transcript gives me a general idea of who left the message and what it was about,” Greenstein says.

“With a text of the transcript, I can check my voicemail while I’m in a meeting, and find out if it’s anything urgent,” says Dave Michels, a consultant and analyst who closely follows unified communications, and author of the blog Pin Drop Soup. “That isn’t an easy feature to get elsewhere.”

Possibly, Google Voice’s most powerful feature is its cost: $0 for the service, $0 for calls within the United States and Canada, and very low rates, starting a $.02 per minute, for international calls. That’s a powerful incentive for a startup or small company on a tight budget. “We use every Google product we can because they’re free and good,” Greenstein says. In the absence of Google Voice, he says, he would look for the lowest cost VoIP solution available, or use a Skype phone number.

No guarantees

But if Google Voice offers huge benefits, it also has a few drawbacks that businesses should know up front. First, there’s no support. If you encounter a problem, your only recourse is the online FAQ and user forums. “If you’re not a little tech-savvy, you might get lost,” Greenstein says.

There’s also no service level agreement, which means no guarantee of how reliable the service will be. Indeed, it has had occasional outages, though most were relatively brief. “I have had some people say they got a busy signal on one of the numbers,” Mettler reports. “I’m not sure whether that was an issue with Google Voice or with my iPhone. And I have had people occasionally say a number just rang and rang, without going to voicemail.”

Another possible drawback for businesses is that Google Voice is designed for individual users who control their own phone numbers. There’s no option for centralized administration. This means that a departing salesperson can take his or her phone number along, which makes it extra-easy to take customers along too. Also, Google Voice does not currently allow users to import their existing phone numbers. But Michels speculates that both features will be offered if Google someday introduces a business-class version of Google Voice, akin to Gmail for Business.

Perhaps its most worrisome down side is that it comes with a degree of uncertainty. “There’s a lot of risk using any service you don’t really own, and people underestimate that,” Michels says. If an employee using Google Voice violates its terms of service, you might find that number or numbers abruptly cut off. Or, the company could simply decide to discontinue Google Voice altogether, as it recently did with another highly popular free service, 1-800-GOOG-411.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t use Google Voice — it’s a valuable tool for many businesses. But, Michels advises, go into it knowing the risks. “Google Voice must cost the company a lot of money. It has no advertising so it isn’t generating much revenue. What could their plan possibly be? It’s fun to have those conversations. But the last thing you should do is assume that the service will be available –or free — forever.”