The Future of Search Series is supported by SES New York, the leading search, social and display conference. From March 19 to 23, get five days of education, inspiration and conversations with marketing experts from the digital space. Register with MASH20 to save 20%.

If you use Google regularly — and who doesn’t? — you’ve probably noticed that the company has been using various ways to coerce you to join Google+, its incipient social network. The plugs have been pretty overt and include a call-to-action on Google’s homepage and automatic G+ registration for new Gmail accounts.

For businesses, the sell has been more subtle. Since Google integrated Google+ results into search under its Google Plus Your World initiative in January, the word has gotten out that lack of a Google+ presence could affect organic search results. The upshot: If you don’t have a Google+ page, your placement for various search terms will suffer.

Companies that specialize in search engine optimization are used to rapid change, but this is something different. These days, if you want to get better search results, you have to know a thing or two about social media marketing. So, Google has, in effect, given you two headaches for the price of one. Another way to look at it is that Google has given you a free opportunity to boost your SEO and get a leg up on competitors who don’t know what Google+ is. “If you’re a first mover on this, you’re going to capture more visibility,” says Rob Garner, vice president of strategy for digital marketing agency iCrossing. “This is kind of a gift in a lot of ways.”

1. Get a Google+ Page

 

 

Unwrapping Google’s gift is pretty easy: Just set up a Google+ account for your business. The company held off on letting brands onto Google+ for a few months, but at this point, the setup is fairly turnkey and even allows for multiple administrators. (You can actually start the process now, before you finish this article by clickinghere.)

2. Get In As Many People’s Circles as Possible

 

 

This part is a bit trickier. The quickest way to get the ball rolling is to put as many people inside your circles as possible. It also helps if those people are in the same industry, so you should include your rivals (you could even make a “competitors” circle), industry gadflies and, if you have a storefront or rely on local customers, people in your community.

There’s nothing you can do to make other people put your business in their circles, but making people in your segment aware that your page exists is a good idea. Erin Everhart, director of web and social media for 352 Media Group, a digital marketing agency, says you should put your Google+ page on your email signature, on your business card and above the fold on your homepage.

Don’t get desperate, though. Buying Google+ fans is a bad idea, Everhart says, because it might get picked up by Google’s search algorithm and result in a lower search profile.

3. Stuff Your Page with As Many Keywords as Possible, But Do It Organically

 

 

As with step 2, there’s a tempting way to cheat — just fill your page with all your relevant keywords — but you should avoid it since you might run afoul of Google. So, instead of randomly or egregiously larding your page with such terms, do it organically. Write posts that include the keywords, but don’t write them specifically for SEO reasons.

Garner says it’s also a good idea to time your posts in the best possible way. In other words, think like a publisher. For instance, during the Super Bowl, if you wrote an interesting post about the halftime show just after it started, you might get traffic and attention from people searching the term. (Garner calls this effect “velocity.” )

Another trick is to use Sparks, a Google+ feature that automatically loads videos and articles found on the Internet to your stream. If you set keyword searches in Sparks, which is an option under the search window, you will be able to see who else is using the term and what they’re saying about it, which could help you craft more relevant posts.

4. Use the +1 Button

 

 

We haven’t heard much about the +1 button since Google introduced it last year as a competitor to the Facebook Like. Yet you may have noticed that you’re seeing more and more profiles of your Google+ friends coming up in searches. That’s because if you +1 a lot of things, particularly things that are relevant to your industry, your image or logo will increase its visibility as well.

Though common sense would dictate that there’s little downside to clicking on a free button, research has shown that there’s a lot of upside, too. A Dutch company called SEO Effect found that getting 72 people to +1 its page resulted in a 20% lift in click-through rates.

Will all this improve your SEO? While it seems likely, the experts just don’t know yet. After all, the integration between Google search and Google+ is still very new. Nevertheless, there’s a strong case to be made for making the most out of Google+. With 100 million users and the full support of Google, only a federal investigation (always a possibility) can stall Google+’s growth. As a business owner, you may not like the fact that Google seems to be offering you little choice but to join Google+, but just like you couldn’t create a credible SEO strategy without considering Google, you now have to also take Google+ into account.

Series supported by SES New York

 

 

The Future of Search Series is supported by SES New York Conference and Expo, connecting the digital dots between search, social and commerce. The SES New York Conference and Expo takes a critical look at the latest developments to help marketers traverse the quickly developing landscape, with a special focus on the latest digital marketing trends and the latest technology launches from Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and more.Register with MASH20 and Save 20%. Join the discussion #SESConf.

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, Maravic, Alija, design56 and Flickr, pierrpo

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Google has a confession to make: It does not understand you. If you ask it “the 10 deepest lakes in the U.S,” it will give you a very good result based on the keywords in the phrase and sites with significant authority on those words and even word groupings, but Google Fellow and SVP Amit Singhal says Google doesn’t understand the question. “We cross our fingers and hope someone on the web has written about these things or topics.”

The future of Google Search, though, could be a very different story. In an extensive conversation, Singhal, who has been in the search field for 20 years, outlined a developing vision for search that takes it beyond mere words and into the world of entities, attributes and the relationship between those entities. In other words, Google’s future search engine will not only understand your lake question but know a lake is a body of water and tell you the depth, surface areas, temperatures and even salinities for each lake.

To understand where Google is going, however, you need to know where it’s been.

Search, Singhal explained, started as a content-based, keyword index task that changed little in the latter half of the 20th century, until the arrival of the World Wide Web, that is. Suddenly search had a new friend: links. Google, Amit said, was the first to use links as “recommendation surrogates.” In those early days, Google based its results on content links and the authority of those links. Over time, Google added a host of signals about content, keywords and you to build an even better query result.

Eventually Google transitioned from examining keywords to meaning. “We realized that the words ‘New’ and ‘York’ appearing next to each other suddenly changed the meaning of both those words.” Google developed statistical heuristics that recognized that those two words appearing together is a new kind of word. However, Google really did not yet understand that New York is a city, with a population and particular location.

Still, word sequences and the meaning they have is something, but not enough for Google or Singhal, who was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Big Changes Coming

Google now wants to transform words that appear on a page into entities that mean something and have related attributes. It’s what the human brain does naturally, but for computers, it’s known as Artificial Intelligence.

It’s a challenging task, but the work has already begun. Google is “building a huge, in-house understanding of what an entity is and a repository of what entities are in the world and what should you know about those entities,” said Singhal.

In 2010, Google purchased Freebase, a community-built knowledge base packed with some 12 million canonical entities. Twelve million is a good start, but Google has, according to Singhal, invested dramatically to “build a huge knowledge graph of interconnected entities and their attributes.”

The transition from a word-based index to this knowledge graph is a fundamental shift that will radically increase power and complexity. Singhal explained that the word index is essentially like the index you find at the back of a book: “A knowledge base is huge compared to the word index and far more refined or advanced.”

Right now Google is, Singhal told me, building the infrastructure for the more algorithmically complex search of tomorrow, and that task, of course, does include more computers. All those computers are helping the search giant build out the knowledge graph, which now has “north of 200 million entities.” What can you do with that kind of knowledge graph (or base)?

Initially, you just take baby steps. Although evidence of this AI-like intelligence is beginning to show up in Google Search results, most people probably haven’t even noticed it.

Knowledge Graph at Work Today

Type “Monet” into Google Search, for instance, and, along with the standard results, you’ll find a small area at the bottom: “Artwork Searches for Claude Monet.” In it are thumbnail results of the top five or six works by the master. Singhal says this is an indication that Google search is beginning to understand that Monet is a painter and that the most important thing about an artist is his greatest works.

When I note that this does not seem wildly different or more exceptional that the traditional results above, Singhal cautioned me that judging the knowledge graph’s power on this would be like judging an artist on work he did as a 12- or 24-month-old.

It could be seen as somewhat ironic that Google is addressing what has been a key criticism leveled at it by its chief search competitor, Microsoft Bing. The software giant ran a series of scathing commercials, which while never mentioning Google by name, depicted the search results most people get as comically lacking context. Most people understood that the criticism and joke was aimed at Google, and now Google is doing something about the quality of its results.

When I asked Singhal if he had thought about Bing’s criticism and realized that Bing has long advertised that its results focus more on useful answers instead of links, Singhal deflected, saying he couldn’t comment on what Bing may or may not be doing.

It’s also worth noting that millions of people now believe they already have AI search thanks to Apple’s iPhone 4S and Siri, the intelligent assistant. It uses the information it can access on your phone and through the web to answer natural language questions. Whatever Google’s Knowledge Graph can do, it clearly needs to go beyond Siri’s brand of AI.

Pinpointing exactly how far you can take the”search of the future,” however, is somewhat difficult for Singhal. “We’re building the ‘hadron collider.’ What particles will come out of it, I can’t predict right now,” he said.

On the other hand, Singhal does admit that it is his dream to build the Star Trek computer. Like Siri, you could ask this computer, which appeared on the 1960s sci-fi TV show, virtually any question and get an intelligent answer. “All aspects of computing or AI improve when you have such an infrastructure in-house,” said Singhal, referring to the massive knowledge graph Google is building. “You can process query or question much better, and you get a step closer to building the Star Trek computer,” he said.

Beyond Search

Speaking of Star Trek, there is another frontier that might benefit from the power of Google’s Knowledge Graph: Robotics. Singhal is, admittedly, no expert, but noted that robotics, which exists at the intersection of mechanical engineers and computing, struggles when it comes to language capabilities. “I believe we are laying the foundation for how robotics would incorporate language into the future of robot-human interaction,” he said.

It’s an exciting thought. Being a robot geek, I proceeded to paint a picture of the future that Singhal did not disagree with: Future robots with access to Google’s entity-based search engine might be able to understand that the “tiny baby” they’re caring for (What? You wouldn’t leave your baby with a robot?) is small, fragile and always hungry. The robot might even know how to feed the baby because it would know the entity “always hungry” has to be cross-referenced with the fact that it’s a “baby,” which is also an entity in the knowledge graph, and includes attributes like “no solids.”

As we talked, it occurred to me that while 200 million entities is a lot, the world of knowledge is vast. How many entities would it take for the Google’s Knowledge Graph to know the answer to everything? Singhal laughed and instead of pinpointing a number spun the question around:

“The beauty of the human mind is that it can build things and decide things in ways we didn’t think were possible, and I think the best answer I can give right now is that the human mind would keep creating knowledge and I see what we’re building in our knowledge graph as a tool to aid the creation of more knowledge. It’s an endless quantitative cycle of creativity.”

With the rise of Pinterest and Tumblr’s astounding growth, it seems that 2012 may be the year of the visual platform. Tumblr surpassed 15 billion monthly pageviews in January, and Pinterest is driving some serious traffic to retailers. We’ve already covered some best practices for brands on Pinterest, but if you’re looking to mix up your content creation, try Tumblr. To date, there have been 16,827,658,845 posts on the site, so isn’t it time you get it on the action?

As with any other platform, there are pros and cons to consider. But with the popularity of Tumblr and the ease of setting up, customizing and maintaining your blog, we suggest you at least check it out — there’s a very engaged Tumblr audience waiting to see your content. Here are some tips to help you get started.

Set Up Your Tumblr

 

 

Pick a password and designate a URL for your Tumblr — the URL will be www.anything.tumblr.com. You can’thost the blog on your website’s domain, but you can set up a custom domain so it matches your website (such as mashable.com/blog), place a button on your site or even link out from your site’s navigation to make it seamless for your users to consume your Tumblr content.

Then, customize your blog. Pick a theme, choose colors, pick a font, upload a header and a profile picture and write a little “about me” section. There are some great themes for small business, and the Mashable team recently pointed out our favorite themes, too. You can choose more of a collage layout if you’re going for a Pinterest-y, image-heavy look, or you can opt for a linear, news-feed layout.

Getting all that set up shouldn’t have taken you too long. Now, let’s start tumbling!

What to Post

 

 

“Blogging” no longer evokes a visual of someone sitting in a coffee shop writing about life all day. With the 140-character limit on Twitter, we’ve lost our attention span for 1,000-word musings. We want simple, palatable content in many different forms. Tumblr has helped to redefine what it means to blog and has made it infinitely easier and faster to do so. Visuals do particularly well on Tumblr, but there’s more to the site than pictures. On your dashboard, you’ll see seven options — text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio and video. Here are some great uses of each kind of post:

• Text: Explain rules for your upcoming content or make an announcement.
• Photo: A product image, a picture of your team, a picture of a celebrity wearing or using your product, a dish at your restaurant, a profile of a new team member. You can upload multiple pics, which is great for an event recap or even product shots — use a wide shot and a close-up, for instance.
• Quote: A one-liner that your fans just need to hear.
• Link: Saw something on the web that you just have to share? Link out to it.
• Chat: Did you have a funny exchange with a customer? Recount it here.
• Audio: Post the jam that has everyone in the office grooving, or maybe a song that mentions your line of work.
• Video: Did you shoot a cool sizzle reel? Post it on Tumblr!

 

 

To make a post, just click the icon of the media type you’d like to post. From there, it’s pretty simple — upload the picture (or video or audio) and fill out all of the fields. Be sure to tag the post with relevant terms, since searching through tags is a great way for people to discover your content. You can publish the post now or schedule it for later. The latter is a great option for time-strapped entrepreneurs — you can set aside some time each week to hammer out a few posts and then space them out over time to keep your page active, while you’re out doing other things, like running your business. Click the box to send the post to Twitter, to allow for easy distribution.

Much like Pinterest, you should go beyond just trying to push your product on Tumblr — try to embody a lifestyle. Sure, you can post product pictures, but don’t be so pushy; instead, be human. If you have a clothing company that just got samples in, show how excited you are and make your Tumblr audience feel special by giving them a first look — try posting something like, “Just got first samples of our new product line! Take a peek!” with some pictures. You can also post about your brand’s history (i.e. where’d your slogan come from? Who designed the logo? Who’s the person answering customer service calls?), along with anecdotes about customer interactions and pictures of office celebrations to give people a behind-the-scenes look at your business. Now more than ever, people want to know from whom they’re buying products, so Tumblr is a great way to let them see how great your company is. This helps build loyalty — and your bottom line.

What Now?

 

 

You’re all set up, and you’ve rattled off a few posts. Are you worried it’ll be tough to maintain your business’ Tumblr? Use the mobile app (see above) for easy blogging. You can even text your update from an SMS phone or update your Tumblr via email — just email your custom Tumblr email address (hint: it’s an @tumblr.com email address, not your login). If you’re an Instagram user, you can also set up the photo-sharing app to send your stylized images to Tumblr, which can add some flair to your blog and help you kill two birds with one stone, by updating two platforms in one simple move.

 

 

As you get in the flow of things, you should start seeing an influx of followers and activity. When you log on to your dashboard, you’ll see the river of content you’ve created, along with notes about who liked or reblogged a post and who started following your Tumblr. Give them a follow back, and then you’ll start seeing their posts when you log in — comment, like and reblog to engage with the audience and build relationships.

Where to Look For Inspiration

 

 

A new undertaking can be daunting, so we’ve gathered up some great small business Tumblrs and explained a bit about what makes these blogs special. Hopefully they’ll inspire you to blog even more.

• Alternative Apparel: Alternative Apparel’s theme is decidedly Pinterest-y — the clothing brand focuses highly on visuals, highlighting celebrities and everyday Joes enjoying life in the brand’s cozy apparel. Clicking on a picture pulls up a caption and product details.
• Foodspotting: Dish-sharing app Foodspotting has Spotted, which highlights dishes for various holidays and occasions, like Chinese New Year. The blog also includes recaps of Foodspotting events, such as the #DimSumDemolition and the Dumpling Waddle in New York. If you’re hungry, it’s probably dangerous to look at the blog, and even if you’re not hungry, you’ll still want to eat these dishes. Thus, the Tumblr serves as a way to remind you that it’s fun to take pictures of your food, which is precisely what the Foodspotting app lets you do.
• Instagram: As you (now) know, you can push your Instagram photos straight to Tumblr, so it’s not surprising that Instagram uses Tumblr to help spread its gospel. Like Foodspotting’s Spotted blog, the Instagram Tumblr motivates people to use the app. Its Weekend Hashtag Project encourages users to take pictures that exemplify a pre-determined hashtag, like #SoloParking. Favorites are then shared on the Tumblr, with kudos for the photogs who took each shot. Then there’s “How I Shoot,” a series in which Instagrammers share tips for taking excellent pictures. There are also tips and best practices throughout the Tumblr in case you’re looking to step up your Instagram game.
• Lure Fishbar: The Soho eatery posts drool-worthy food porn, like king crab rolls and the sushi bar special. Then, there are plenty of sultry ambient shots of the restaurant to entice chic eaters into the venue, along with pics of the chef with New York celebs, like Carmelo Anthony.
• Warby Parker: The blog, Zagg Pepper, takes a clean approach — there’s a simple layout, a white background and a commitment to post “musings, inspirations and fun stuff.” Though the brand purveys glasses, the blog highlights all things intellectual, artsy and stimulating, since the brand’s bespectacled devotees are often into that sort of thing.
• Ace Hotel: The Ace is a boutique hotel that embodies a cool, high-end lifestyle, with locations in New York, Portland, Seattle and Palm Springs. The Ace Hotel blog boasts pictures of the properties, Ace-branded apparel and pictures of local art exhibits, in addition to promoting local shops and bands.
• Mashable: Of course, as a site that covers social media, Mashable makes good use of the platforms that are out there, including Tumblr. The Mashable Tumblr, MashableHQ.com, is a peek behind the scenes at our New York City headquarters. You’ll find pictures of our office dogs and founder Pete Cashmore on a scooter. But there’s also some more substantive information, like updates from our Social Good Summit and Mashable Connect.

Here, we’ve covered the nuts and bolts of Tumblr. Below, you’ll find some tips to get your business even more exposure, and check out Mashable‘s guide for building your brand on Tumblr.

• New and Improved Dashboard.  When you first log into the client control panel, you will notice a new and improved dashboard.  This will show you your account overview as well as the current information we have on file for you.  It will also list the most recent support tickets and invoices you have and any invoices that are due or past due.  Lastly it shows you the Redo Every 2  status for each of the websites for which we are Your-Web-Guys.
• My Services Section.  This is a brand new feature for our client control panel.  It shows you the services you currently have with us, when we started service, billing cycle, next due date and other important information you need.  You can also order new services, new addons to your current website, and see what is available to be added to your specific package.
• Billing Section. The billing section is no longer just for invoices and receipts.  Now you can pay multiple invoices as once, edit your credit card information for automated billing, and even view the quotes you have asked us to give you.
• New Support Section. No more sending an email and not knowing if it got through or what the status of your request is.  Now with our new support ticket system you can not only see and submit support requests, but also browse our searchable knowledge base for answers to your questions before you even ask!  You can also see and get any downloads that you may need for your specific service needs as well as see the status of the Your-Web-Guys network of servers.
• New Projects Section. The most exciting new section is by far the projects section.  Now you can view the status of your projects at the click of a button.  If you need to give us information you will be notified as soon as the task is due.  When a task is updated you will get an email with the information right in your in-box and see the estimated time spent, time remaining, and percentage of completion each task is for your projects.
• New Contacts Section. If you have multiple folks that we need to communicate with, now we can.  You can have your bookkeeper get invoices, your IT guy send and receive support tickets, your PR department order new products or any combination thereof.  All of your people can now work with Your-Web-Guys in whatever capacity you prefer.

To log into your account just put in your email address and password into the form on the bottom right of any page of our new website.

The first website was published twenty years ago yesterday and boy have we come a long way in a very short time.  New web standards like html5 are replacing things like flash and new technologies are causing us in the web design world to rethink the way we do things.  The emergence of powerful scripting languages like PHP and the use of databases such as MySql have given us the ability to offer easy to use solutions to our clients.

This package addresses the following things on the internet which we have dubbed Emerging Markets:

• The Blogosphere: We have all heard of it and now this package automatically includes a blog of your own and the support you need to make it effective.
• Facebook Page: Most of the large companies you can think of not only have a page on Facebook, but a customized, brand heavy presence that caters to Facebook users and their wants and needs, now you can too.
• Twitter Page: Again, most large companies have Twitter accounts that are customized to help with their brand consciousness, with this package you can too.
• YouTube Channel: YouTube is one of the most visited websites on the internet and if you dont have a channel that matches your branding on other outlets then you are missing out.  With this package all you have to do is make the videos.
• I-Pad/I-Phones: Even though Android has made major inroads in the smartphone and tablet markets, Apple is still the leader overall.  Unfortunately Apple products do not parse flash applications.  We make sure that all of your marketing will be view-able by apple products even if they have flash applications on them normally.
• Mobile Websites: Smart phones can view a website like any computer can, but they are slightly slower and have a much smaller screen.  Even smartphone users sometimes prefer a mobile version of your website so they can load the information they need quickly and without the normal clutter of a regular web page.  We included a mobile version of your site to address this.
• Facebook Fan Gate: a Fan Gate is where you ask for a Facebook user to like your page before you give them exclusive content.  With this package you can use this extremely effective marketing technique quickly and easily.

Groupon has been hailed as the new miracle advertising tool. It has also been accused of being a ruthless corporate giant, preying on the ignorance of small businesses.

Since its inception in November 2008, Groupon (think social media meets coupons) has transformed the way local businesses promote their products and services.

How does it work?

read the rest of the story on socialmediaexaminer.com.  They wouldn’t let us post the entire article here.

Is your business on Twitter? It should be. The microblogging site has tweeted its way, 140 characters at a time, to the top of the social media ladder. With more than 200 million members sending out an estimated 65 million tweets per day, your business should be engaged.

Here are eight tips to get you started in the right direction.

1. Build a Following

No matter how valuable your Twitter communications are, they have little purpose without readers. Your tweets are publicly searchable by all who look for specific topics, but you need to build a following of users who actively subscribe to your content. Your Twitter followers represent your community, and are the audience you are really engaging with.

If you’re Ashton Kutcher, Charlie Sheen, or Lady Gaga, just show up, and millions will follow you instantly. If you are not a megastar, though–and most of us aren’t–you will have to put a little more effort into it. Start by inviting any existing customer communities you might have.

TweetDeck is a powerful tool for Twitter that helps you organize and schedule tweets.Does your company have a Website, blog, customer e-mail distribution list, or a product newsletter? Use all means at your disposal. If your customers have a Twitter account, invite them to follow you. You should also include the Twitter icon with a link to your Twitter account in your e-mail signature, marketing collateral, or anything else that might get exposure. You can even provide incentives for anyone who follows you, such as the chance to win a free product or service, or a discount.

Part of the culture of Twitter is that users generally follow back those who follow them. Click on Twitter’s own “Who to Follow” link for suggestions. A tool like Tweet Adder software can provide even more detail. Use it to search for Twitter users who already follow similar companies, or who express an interest in your topic or industry, and then automatically follow those users. Some portion of them are likely to follow your Twitter account. First, of course, make your Twitter page attractive with a compelling profile image, background, and “About” description.

2. Know the Rules of Engagement

If you’re a newbie, get to know the basic Twitter best practices, such as direct messaging, “@” replies, and “retweeting.” You can send a private message directly to someone who follows you by typing the letter “d” in front of their username in a tweet. In your public tweets, use “@” replies to comment on any other user’s tweets; just include the “@” symbol before their username in your message. If you want to repeat what someone else tweeted, choose “Retweet” and include the letters “RT” in the beginning of your note. You can even ask politely in a tweet for others to retweet you.

These practices draw attention to fellow users, who in turn can see that you’re noticing them. To use them well, add your own insight in a retweet rather than simply repeating what someone else said. And check when others call out your tweets, so you can keep the conversation flowing. Once you have the hang of the basics, tools such as GroupTweet enable you to communicate with groups of users, even privately.

3. Provide Value

One of the biggest mistakes companies make with Twitter–and social media in general–is trying to use it for old-fashioned marketing. The sound bite or slogan that you plaster on a highway billboard or in a magazine ad may come across as false on Twitter.

Tweets should include original thoughts and build a conversation that engages other users by using tactics such as “retweeting.”Twitter can be an effective marketing tool, but social media is about engaging in conversationand providing value. You market by who you are, not by what you say. You can certainly use Twitter as a medium for announcing new products or features, but your tweets have to provide more value to keep your audience interested. Share relevant news about your industry in general, as well as helpful tips and advice, and some general conversation to give your followers a reason to stay engaged and participate in the discussion. Make your tweets entertaining and witty, and say something unique. Position yourself as an expert in your field and offer free advice. It’s better to extend your personality and opinion than merely to parrot headlines from news stories.

4. Keep It a Tight Fit

Make sure that you’re not spending most of your 140-character allowance on a long Web address. URL-shortening services like Bit.ly or TinyURL can abbreviate such lengthy strings. Bit.ly provides additional value by gathering valuable metrics you can use to monitor the success of your Twitter efforts. You can examine how many clicks your shortened links get, and where in the world your URL is getting the most action–information you can use to figure out what works best.

5. Enrich Tweets With Third-Party Tools

A seemingly countless number of third-party tools and plug-ins can extend the value of Twitter. While Twitter was founded on the concept of essentially providing public SMS text messages via the Internet, you can extend its capabilities beyond the standard 140 text characters. Start by using TwitPic or Yfrog to send photos or video clips out via Twitter. Enable these services to work on your smartphone so that you can show, not tell, about the funny thing you saw on the street.

You can make tweets more interactive by connecting them with polls, using a service likeTwtpoll, or with chat rooms, using Nurph. Your followers will find more value in paying attention to your tweets if they find interesting conversations to participate in. And integrating Twitter with location-based services such as Foursquare can call attention, for instance, to that conference you’re speaking at in Atlanta, and maybe someone nearby in your field will notice.

Tweetdeck–which was recently acquired by Twitter–lets you view and manage multiple Twitter accounts, as well as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Google Buzz, and Foursquare accounts. You can create lists and filter content to cut through the noise, and use Tweetdeck to post updates to the various connected networks. Columns in Tweetdeck let you monitor specific keywords or hash tags. You can also set up a column in Tweetdeck to monitor when other Twitter accounts mention your company, providing you with an opportunity to recognize loyal customers, identify possible public-relations issues, and put out fires quickly.

Klout attempts to give your influence a numeric score. Hey, we can’t all be Lady Gaga.Tweetdeck lets you schedule tweets to post in advance, but Flowtown’s Timely goes a step further. It analyzes your past tweets to estimate what time of day favored them the most. Then, it autoschedules your future tweets accordingly.

6. Hash It Out

You can use hash tags (the # symbol followed by a keyword) to make your Tweets easier to search for. Tools including Tweetdeck and Hashtags.org let you see the latest tweets for any hash tag. One common Twitter hash tag is #FollowFriday or #FF, which you can include on Fridays along with the names of Twitter accounts you find valuable. It is a great word-of-mouth means of attracting new followers. If you are mentioned via FollowFriday, reply back to say thank you. That sort of personal touch is one of the things fellow users appreciate.

One way to attract attention is to tweet about a topic while it’s popular. Set up a Google Alert to track the topics in your field, and when it sends a hot story to your e-mail inbox, tweet about it. If your company fixes old PCS, and a report about electronics waste is making headlines, you could include the hashtag #ewaste in a tweet explaining how your work keeps tech out of landfills. Even if you’re not commenting on one of the top news stories of the day, you can tie your tweets to upcoming events in your area. For example, if your business bakes seasonal organic pies, you could include hash tags like #localfood and #farmersmarket to announce that you’ll be at next Sunday’s farmers market. NearbyTweets lets you view who’s talking about nearly any topic in a specific part of the world, such as real estate in Chicago.

7. Avoid Pitfalls

We already talked about not using Twitter as a bullhorn for spamming followers with marketing sound bites. But watch out for other pitfalls. For one thing, remember that many “followers” aren’t actually paying attention. While the tactic of following like-minded Twitter accounts in the hope of soliciting a reciprocal follow has merit, it only goes so far. Many of the users who follow back are just using that same tactic to pump up their own following, and aren’t really interested in your tweets or your business.

Check out Klout or PeerIndex to get an idea of how many of your followers are actively engaged. These services assign a score from 1 to 100 to measure your online influence. At some point, you have to draw the line and stop using the strategy of following others just so they will follow you back. Let your Twitter account speak for itself, and let word of mouth build quality followers that matter.

8. Don’t Expect Miracles

Need I remind you that you are not Lady Gaga? You won’t instantly have millions of followers. There won’t be a miraculous spike in sales or profit for your company just because you set up a Twitter account. As with anything worth doing, there is no magic shortcut.

If you do it right, Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool–a subtle instrument for building brand recognition and customer loyalty. Be patient. Provide value. Build a community, and let the content and success of that community be the force that drives your success–both on Twitter, and as a business

Image via Wikipedia

Editors Note: This is a fantastic article on some tips and tricks that social networking novices need to know about twitter.  Twitter has become almost as important as Facebook when it comes to keeping on top of your brand and your customers feed back.  The original post is here

While Twitter users have become more active in the past year, there are only a few who are consistently valuable, engaging and respected.

Becoming one of those users is a challenging task, but it’s also something that can pay big dividends. That’s why we asked the world’s leaders in digital for their advice on how to become a master Twitter user.

On May 12-14, several hundred of the world’s digital leaders gathered in Orlando for the first-ever Mashable Connect, an intimate three-day conference focused on the impact of social media and digital on entertainment, media, technology and society. Connect attendees, along with TeamMashable, had the chance to hear about the biggest trends in digital from the leaders of Syfy, HBO, Edelman, Gowalla, Tumblr, Buddy Media and more.

On Saturday, I walked around the conference floor, asking Connect attendees one simple question: “What one tip do you have for best using Twitter?” I got a wide variety of responses from CEOs, entrepreneurs and accomplished professionals in the digital world. Some had very simple advice, while others had proverb-like quotations. But each had something completely different to say about the world’s hottest microblogging service.

Here’s the sage advice our Connect attendees had to give:

Twitter Tips

• 1) @jeffpulver, Casting Director, #140conf: “The secret to Twitter is to listen, connect, share and engage. It’s the conversations that matter.”
• 2) @davepeck, Director of Community, Meshin: “Respond to everybody, positive or negative.”
• 3) @michiganflavor, COO, MIFlavor.com: “Retweet, retweet, retweet. People love to see their stuff retweeted, and they’ll start retweeting you.”
• 4) @shrmsocmedguy, Social Media Strategist, Shrm: “Use your tweeting to set up meetings.”
• 5) @dstatusstalker, Chief Status Stalker, Status Stalker: “Start a conversation. Reach out to others, and say hello.”
• 6) @kratzpr, Founder, Kratz PR: “Don’t think of it as a tool, think of it as a gateway for being social.”
• 7) @ctreada, CEO, Notice Technologies: “Ignore it; they’re all pornographers anyway.” (Chris’s other tip: “Chill out.”)
• 8) @jkrohrs, VP of Marketing, ExactTarget: “Don’t tweet if you can’t spell.”
• 9) @moniguzman, Director of Outreach, Intersect: “Tweet what comes naturally. Don’t try to fulfill someone else’s expectations.”
• 10) @shashib, Social Media Swami, Network Solutions: “More than an RSS feed, connecting with people on Twitter gives you interesting content that is validated by them.”
• 11) @jennydevaughn, Director, Social Strategy, @HODES: “You need to have brand sacrifice if you want to be viewed as an expert in your field. Only tweet about 10 topics, events or ideas.”
• 12) @robkey, CEO, Converseon: “Embrace your insignificance.”
• 13) @zagrrl: VP Technology, Innovation Center for US Diary: “The best way to learn is to share.”
• 14) @heidiotway: VP & Director Social Media, Salter Mitchell: “Follow the best, learn from the best.”
• 15) @jonnorp, Director of Social Media, American Airlines: “Remember that it flies forever.”
• 16) @chrisvary, Director of Emerging Technology, Weber Shandwick: “Don’t connect your Twitter to Facebook.”
• 17) @joeyinteractive, Interactive Creative Director, Disney Parks: “Marketing doesn’t spread; stories do.”

Now that the Anthony Weiner Twitter meltdown has pretty much played out, I’m surprised that there hasn’t been much discussion of the butterfly wing-flap that brought him down: Twitter’s rules of engagement when it comes to “following.”

The success of a social network is largely determined by its settings. In 2006, an engineer named Jack Dorsey had an idea for a way for people to share short updates on their lives with friends and family.

Working with a small team, Dorsey and his colleagues began developing and testing the product. This included determining the built-in boundaries of the service, a process which would determine the breadth and purpose of the entire project.

Twitter was a simple idea but settings had to be just right, like the proper temperature for a soufflé.

WIRED: Twitter creator Jack Dorsey returns

Should the rules be very restrictive, to preserve privacy and intimacy? (Too much restriction would make the service less useful.) Or should they be expansive, and invite a wide circle to share one’s status reports? (Too broad a channel would mean a depersonalized cohort.)

The breakthrough that enabled Twitter to become the wildly successful service it is now came from a twist that was much more significant than even its founders knew: They made it possible to “follow” someone’s messages without requiring permission.

Essentially you would take out a subscription to someone’s Twitter stream. You would follow your best friend or your brother in the same way you would follow Barack Obama, DeSean Jackson or theNew York Times.

This was a break from the traditional two-way agreement that ruled communications in previous social systems. This changed Twitter from an asynchronous instant messaging system into a hybrid of a social network and broadcast medium.

“The relationship model was something that we debated a lot,” says Evan Williams, who headed the company (Odeo) that created Twitter. “In the first version, by default you were private.” (This quote is from a conversation I had with Williams in 2009, when I was working on a story for Wired.)

But then Dorsey’s team came up with the idea that you could follow someone without them following you.

“That was really important,” says Williams. “From my perspective, I wanted something like a blog relationship model. What I thought was beautiful about blogs as opposed to e-mail or anything else is it’s completely up to the recipient of the information whether or not they consume it.”

But Twitter was much more intimate than blogs. Following someone on Twitter was not exactly like setting up a blog feed or subscribing to a magazine. You became part of a visible community.

In order to make this happen, Twitter made public the list of people you followed, as well as the list of people who followed you. You would notice when your friends followed the same people you did. You could make connections with other people who followed the same tweeters you followed.

To further encourage the community aspect of Twitter, the founders determined that by default, all messages would be public. Weirdly, one of the questions that came up during this discussion was whether people would be creeped out when it came to flirting and other personal issues.

“This openness was the result of a lot of thought around the way we had started recognizing that people were communicating online,” says Noah Glass, who was part of the original team. (I interviewed Glass for the aforementioned story.) “We were on MySpace, and I got into a lot of trouble from various girls posting things on that thing out in the open, and I started thinking about openness — we all started thinking about openness.

“We come from a world where privacy is important. But we realized that not everyone shared this feeling about privacy in that same kind of way,” Glass says. “People were having really intimate discussions out for everyone else to read. I realized that that the level of privacy we thought was important, was not necessarily important to a certain group of people for a certain type of communication. And so making any conversation open and followable was something based on those systems that were becoming popular.”

This thinking influenced the settings when Twitter, because of user demand, implemented a “reply” feature. The replies, just like any other tweets, were public.

But what if you wanted to have a truly private conversation, as with SMS or e-mail, with someone on Twitter? This presented a problem to those with a huge following.

WIRED: Reporter tweets cell number to world, no one calls

One way to do this would be to allow users to send a private message to any other user, just as they can with e-mail. But celebrities and others with large followings didn’t want to open a private channel to just anyone.

So Twitter decided that for “direct” messages there should be some limits. Direct, private messages could only be sent to someone who followed you. The fact that you followed someone meant that you’d probably be happy to hear from him or her. To have a back-and-forth conversation, then, both parties would have to be following each other.

The service has never really figured a way to foolproof the process. It is a rare Twitter user — even an experienced one — who has not mistakenly sent something intended as a direct message out into the public Twittersphere. Happens all the time.

These settings helped make Twitter catnip for loquacious politicians like Anthony Weiner, who used it to establish his feisty personality with a nationwide community.

But it also proved his undoing when he misused Twitter for sordid sexual contact with women.

Twitter’s regimen of rules tanked Anthony Weiner in several ways.

First of all, it provided a public record of the initial contacts that Weiner made with the women.

Here was the apparent pattern of Weiner’s inappropriate communications: a woman would tweet an encouraging public message to the legislator — which would be public, the only way she could communicate to him. (By and large, since the women were political supporters and not thinking of themselves as material for his sexual fantasies, this wasn’t a problem for them.)

Then Weiner would respond to them — but his responses were constrained by the knowledge that his replies were public.

Weiner needed a more private channel of communication for flirtations up to and including pictures of his package. Since the women followed him already, he could send them direct messages. But to receive their replies, he had to follow them in return. Only then could he engage in flirting or sexual repartee.

Weiner seemed not to realize the extent to which Twitter’s rules still made him vulnerable.

The women were publicly listed among those accounts he followed. Since he only followed around 200 people, these new followers seemed out of place among the politicians, journalists, and celebrities on his list.

It was all too easy for a political foe to notice that Weiner was adding young women (and in at least one case, a porn star) to his followers soon after a public exchange.

And that is exactly what happened. A right-wing activist noticed Weiner’s pattern and then harassed the young women the congressman followed.

But even then, Weiner did not curtail his behavior. He simply unfollowed those women and found new ones to flirt with. His Twitter use was a train wreck waiting to happen.

The train wreck occurred when Weiner confronted the confusing rail yard that Twitter’s founders never truly fixed: the inadequately drawn distinction between a public message and a direct one.

When Weiner decided to send a young woman a picture of his crotch — wearing gray boxers that barely contained his tumescence — he had already taken the step of following her. But he made a common mistake between a direct private message and a public reply, and sent the picture out to the tens of thousands of people who followed him.

That was so crazily egregious that Weiner’s initial lies that his account had been hacked seemed plausible.

But the evidence of his deeper misbehavior was already out in the open: the thumbnails of the young women he followed, publicly available on his Twitter account.

Journalists, political rivals, and right-wing muckrakers had no problem finding multiple women who had flirted and even received more graphic photos via “private” Twitter messages. When asked about what happened, the women talked, and Weiner’s original “I was hacked” story fell apart.

Weiner was caught in the social net, undone by a bunch of conversations several years earlier between some San Francisco geeks trying to figure out the settings of a cool new product.

The details of web product design had led to the pants being pulled down on a promising political career.

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