Just this week, it won the coveted “Best New Start-Up” award at the TechCrunch “Crunchies”, previous winners have included Quora, Friendfeed and Bing, so they are in good company.

 So what is Pinterest and why should you care?  Glad you asked.

Pinterest is a forum for users to create and share visual “pinboards” of things they like online.  Simply put, it’s a pictorial way to express images (either static or video) you find on the web or photograph or import from your social media accounts.  From there it’s easy for others to browse your pictures and “repin” what they like too.

You can create shopping wish-lists (which even allow you to list and sort by price), collect design ideas or share recipe and craft projects.  And as you might guess, Pinterest tends to appeal to females (58% of current users) but with nearly 8 Million unique users and growing fast (a four-fold increase between September and December 2011) the audience should open up.

So the idea is cool, the application is fun to use and the numbers don’t lie.

But just what is this SEO secret?

While there have been anecdotal stories of websites achieving tremendous results from the search engines that could only be attributed to Pinterest, data released this week from Shareaholic shows that it has now surpassed Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube COMBINED as a traffic referrer and now its barely behind Twitter and Google.

If this growth stays on trend, this time next month is could leapfrog both Twitter and Google and be the third highest traffic referrer.

The Bottom Line

If you are implementing any kind of offsite SEO or Link Building campaigns for your website, you really should explore establishing content on Pinterest.  Of course, this is most applicable for brands with visual products or services, but be creative and see what you can achieve.  Rest assured that if your competitors are smart online marketers, they’re probably evaluating Pinterest too.  So why not beat them to the punch?

The time is NOW!

This infographic below is about, yes, you guessed it, infographics and gives an overview about what works (and doesn’t) when building one.

The bottom line is, use them when you have something to say that truly conveys some information of interest.  And don’t forget to properly name your infographic so it can be found on image searches.

Its actually not as complex as one would think. Many of the fundamentals and norms of Corporate brands marketing in the social world remain the same for small businesses. And with the proper technology, brands can empower (and monitor) their local marketing partners to ensure success. In no particular order, the right toolkit should help drive the following:

1. Authenticity. The social web is made up of social creatures – we all want to interact with a person or entity we know to be authentic – there is no substitute. Interacting with unedited personalities is key. Ghost writing, when not done properly, is a sure-fire way to hamper results.
2. Familiarity. People enjoy engaging with people familiar to them – family members, friends and/or local relationships. Familiarity is why social media has become so tremendously popular. Social media has exponentially increased a person’s capability to manage more relationships. Its no wonder why local conversations generate 6 to 10 times more response than national content. People prefer to engage with people – much less so brands. Anytime you can put an actual person with a pre-existing relationship to your audience behind the brand, you are much more likely to get them to listen. This means moving the conversation to local.
3. Expediency in Response. Who wants to interact with someone that takes their time in addressing an issue? People are “wired-in” 24/7 – they expect their companies to follow suit. Virality is instantaneous – if you don’t respond to something negative or positive within an acceptable time-frame, you lose social street-cred.
4. Engagement. Your audience has a voice and wants to have a say in your business. Engaging them tells you that they care, and can also help give you a competitive edge in your business. For example, getting customer feedback on a new product and better understanding what your customers want.
5. Honesty. If you make a mistake, acknowledge it. Be truthful with your audience.
6. Long-term Focus. As with all marketing, know the life-time value of your customer and make sure you resonate that view with your audience. Focus on increasing fans and followers. Social media is a chance to keep your customers “plugged-in”, versus other marketing mediums which is all about the one-time response for that specific campaign.

By keeping all of these fundamentals in view, the proper tools can push these fundamentals to a localized social media. These tools should make your local efforts easy – for your brand and the local marketing partners who represent it.

You may think, “Really? Do I really need to be online for my small business? I’ve survived without it until now, why should I go through the trouble and expense?”

OR

“But I don’t sell anything online, so what’s the use?”

The fact that you don’t sell online is precisely WHY you need to be online.  Let me explain.  If you rely on having people come to your place of business, then one thing MUST happen first.  Ready?  THEY HAVE TO FIND YOU.

Sure, you may already have a large repeat business, or benefit from great word-of-mouth, but if you need to grow and acquire new business (and really, who doesn’t?) then you have to be where these new customers search.  And guess where that is – online!

Studies show that for the #1 traditional way for a small business to get found, the trusty ole yellow pages, consumer use has fallen by 50% since 2004.  So that leaves print and broadcast media.  But no one is reading publications anymore, and broadcast media is generally too expensive and casts too wide a net for your small business.

At the end of the day, it’s all about your customer and understanding their needs, wants and actions.  If you aren’t following or at least aware of what consumers are doing, then you’re bound to find yourself out of step.

And this is perhaps the biggest reason of all; your competition is probably already online.  So if a customer is searching, guess who they will find?  At the very least you need an online presence to level the playing field.

Need cold hard facts to really digest how big a shift this is?  Consider this: Seattle has implemented an online yellow pages opt-out program and Dallas will discontinue production altogether after 2012.

So it’s pretty simple really, the first rule of local advertising is now having an online presence.  Just Get Found!

As we start a new year in 2012, here are some underlying trends to keep note of:

• More focus on visual content with less on written -a  ClickZs recent Study indicated that tweaking a specific image had far greater impact on click-throughs and conversions than swapping out copy, or even headlines of the copy

• Continued emergence of legal precedents around social media – As with everything new, legal precedents and judgements usually trail behind. Expect to see much more trail-blazing in this regard.   For example, Facebook has recently encountered a lawsuit when it started running ads in News Feeds that told friends that other friends “liked” a specific product or service. Angel Fraley and other users filed a class-action lawsuit claiming Facebook misappropriated their likeness when running “sponsored stories” and never received their permission to use their names – also known as the “right of publicity”. The Federal Judge overseeing the case refused to throw out the ruling.

• More regulatory rulings weighing in on social media – For highly regulated industries, like the financial industry, expect more regulatory authorities like FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) weighing in on the use of social media – particularly by local entities like insurance advisers and local branches. Late in 2011, FINRA ruled that firms and reps do not need to have a principal approve the content of  a status update, post or tweet prior to it being released because it is not considered static content. Although the brand under which the adviser or rep runs its business is ultimately responsible for content and messaging on these sites, the ruling establishes faster speed to market for messaging and communications.

Seven to 10 times!!!!

Is there really a way to algorithmically generate influence scores?

I don’t know, but 13 years ago I asked the same question about search and look what Google has done.

How have we been measuring who has influence?

Twitter followers? Facebook Likes? Linkedin connections? YouTube views? Come on man! Isn’t it time that  these companies have some sort of REAL measurement? Until then, we have these measurement indexes.  It will not be perfect, and people will be able to game the system. But guess what, you can game the system with SEO even with Panda, Gorilla, Godzilla and Orangutan updates.

Does anyone actually give a damn about a Klout or PeerIndex score?

• I am a top notch Social Media Guru my Klout score is 76. Yours is 20. You suck!
• Obviously we have more influence in the industry than company XYZ. Look at their PeerIndex score at 17 and ours is 82. We clearly have more influence and understand that space better.
• My Klout score is 90. Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?

The Twitter or Facebook challenged and people with low scores say Hell No to scores! But the reality is 100 million people have signed up to get a Klout score. So as Lebron James says 10 times at every interview ‘At the end of the day’ people do care.

Top Players in the Social Influence Measurement Industry

• Klout
• PROskore
• PeerIndex
• XeeMe
• EmpireAvenue
• Flout

Klout – http://www.klout.com/

The Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage you influence others. The Klout Score uses data from social networks in order to measure:

• True Reach: How many people you influence
• Amplification: How much you influence them
• Network Impact: The influence of your network

Networks Used to Gauge Your influence
Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Linkedin, WordPress, Blogger, Foursquare, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, LastFm, Flickr

I like Klout’s layout design, its pretty simple and clean.  One of the “sticky” characteristics of Klout is the Perks program, where based on your score you can earn Klout Perks. I got some Blackwing high end pencils by Palomino. Although really I haven’t used a pencil since Nixon was in office. I also received a PERSON OF INTEREST screen wipe, some mini cards from Moo, a $10 Credit at LeftLane Sports and $25 off at BlueFly.com. So far, for what it’s worth I am fine with my Klout sign up. I am not changing my life, writing more blogs or retweeting.  But as Charlie Sheen would say ,‘Winning’ with my perks.

PeerIndex – http://www.peerindex.com

Your overall PeerIndex score is a relative measure of your online authority. The PeerIndex Score reflects the impact of your online activities, and the extent to which you have built up social and reputational capital on the web.

Networks Used to Gauge Your influence
Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, WordPress, Blogger, RSS feed

I like Peerindex the home page is pretty straightforward easy to read. They do not harass you every minute about how you need to come back to the site and do things. And they are starting a PeerPerks project so you can get free products like Klout. Now, I am not saying perks influence me to like a site but, if someone is measuring me and I get something out of it then I am ok.

XeeMe – http://www.xeeme.com

I could not find a good an explanation of the XeeMe XeeScore which they mention on their site. But they do have the best analytics and use 202 social networks for their score where everyone else uses less than 10.

Networks Used to Gauge Your influence
202 Supported Networks

EmpireAvenue – http://www.empireavenue.com

If you produce a tweet, post a Facebook item on your wall, upload a photo to Flickr etc., we pay you in Eaves every day. We call these activity earnings. Earnings for each network (Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, etc.) are capped.

At EmpireAvenue they want you to be active on your social networks and within EmpireAvenue. This is too much work for my busy schedule. Since I do not engage on their site I have a bad score. But I ain’t mad at them. I do see people very active and enjoying the site.

Networks Used to Gauge Your influence
Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Blogger, RSS, Flicke, FourSquare, Beta Sites – Instagram, WordPress, Google+

PROskore – http://www.proskore.com

PROskore is an online business network that measures professional reputation. We do this by looking at your professional background, social media influence and overall popularity. We then use your score to help YOU generate new business from other members of the PROskore network.

PROscore is the Linkedin of Social Measurement sites. PROskore is designed to help professionals generate business. Their goal is to generate leads for your business and help you connect with others.  For the business minded, you have to go this way.

Networks Used to Gauge Your influence
Twitter, Facebook, Klout, Linkedin, YouTube, Blog, Google

Flout.me – http://flout.me

Your social influence is too important to leave to others.

Sites like Klout try to tell you how important you are. That’s ridiculous! Only you know how important you are. Flout lets you flaunt it to the world.

This is for everyone who really thinks all this social influence measurement is a joke. Go to Flout.me, sign up through Twitter and make up a large score like 800 and then tweet it. Just like you do on Klout when your score has increased. This is clearly just for fun!

Networks Used to Gauge Your influence
Twitter

Measuring influence, reputation and coming up with a score is a tough business. There will be millions of critics who love it and another 2 million who can’t stand it. They key is how will it affect what people do.  Do Klout and Peerindex encourage people to write, retweet , blog and engage in more conversations?  Can these scores be used as a real tool for business?  The bottom line is what effect will it have on you.

What’s your opinion on Klout, PeerIndex, PROskore, EmpireAvenue and Xeeme? We’d love to hear it!

At the beginning of 2011, we re-launched our technology after a 2-year feature freeze – allowing our company to grow into global markets by building out foreign currency conversion and language capabilities.

We also released version 3.0 of our software. It was a monumental effort to rebuild everything since our launch 5 years ago, and now we are set to introduce the next significant upgrade of our platform.  This new capability will give our Corporate clients the flexibility to custom tailor their platform and engage their local marketers in a manner never before realized in our industry.

With this upgrade, we have a game-changing product roadmap for 2012 that will revolutionize the way corporate brands support local reps, agents, franchises, VARs, affiliates – across traditional, direct and social media.

I’d like to highlight some other milestones we are particularly proud of:

•  In 2011, we were recognized on the Deloitte Fast 500 as the #27 fastest growing technology company in the U.S. and were recognized for a second time on the Inc 500|5000 list. To date, we have grown organically, with no outside funding, which speaks to the product and services we are pioneering in a brand new market category.
• We doubled our corporate client base in one year from the momentum we built in the previous five.
• We moved into the first phase renovation of our brand new headquarters – giving us growing room for future years.
• We tripled the size of our Account Management team – allowing us to give more concentrated, strategic support to our Corporate clients.
• We upgraded our world-class class customer support platform allowing us to service tens of thousands of local marketers across distributed organizations – with the marketing services and resources of the brands they sell – setting the bar at a 95% customer satisfaction rate going into the new year.

We are extremely excited by the prospects of 2012, and are committed to keeping our customers’ satisfaction first by delivering exceptional innovation. We continue to work with our Corporate clients to build stronger integration points to make local marketing automation and execution more seamless.

We believe we can change the playing field for local marketers by delivering the resources of the brands they sell – thus empowering them with the best tools to execute world-class marketing strategy and programs.

We are humbled by your support and wish you a great new year.

Like many small business owners, franchises and local reps in distributed marketing networks are overwhelmed by the pace at which technology is changing. And with significant resource constraints compared to the Fortune 500 first-movers, most just don’t have the time to spend to dedicate to this medium to see returns.

That doesn’t mean social media, or its importance to marketers and brands, is going away.

“Over the next five years, most industries will get rethought around social and people,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at last year’s Web 2.0 Summit.

The Zuck is right – social media will change the way we as consumers interact with brands. By last count, there were over 750, 300 and 100 million active users on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, respectively. This doesn’t include the other up-and-coming social media sites both domestically in the United States and abroad.

On Facebook alone, users are spending over 22 billion minutes a day. Numbers like these are hard to ignore.

A few months ago, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff spoke about this at the Dreamforce conference. He emphasized the need for companies to get on board –  or risk being overthrown similar to the recent uprisings in the Middle East.

“We saw an Arab Spring. We’re going to see a Corporate Spring,” he said, likening a new movement to the social media-influenced revolutions in countries like Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. “CEOs need to transform themselves as leaders. You should be in touch with your customers. That’s my point. Are you reflecting change? Things are changing. Can you still operate like a foreign dictator? I don’t think command and control is going to work in the future.” You can see the video here.

According to a 2010 Forrester survey, close to 75% of CMOs consider social media a first priority. Without a doubt, decision makers understand the importance of social media and why they must get involved.

But aside from the employee and customer ecosystem Marc talks about in the video, a key part of the equation is supporting the local marketing ecosystem – the local reps, agents, franchises, etc. – that represent a brand’s products and services locally. These local marketers are in desperate need of help and resources – and without it – a huge decentralized marketing opportunity (and problem) across the social sphere is being overlooked.

We’ll talk about 2012 social media trends in the next post, and why the effort to support distributed marketers is perhaps the most important oncoming movement for brands involved in social media.

When did you last receive a hand written anything? In today’s uniformly printed society, the small human touches we receive mean more because they are much less frequent. As a result, they make a much bigger impression on us, we pay better attention to them, and this provides marketers an opportunity to make a real impact.

Having a recipient feel like a person rather than a record creates a bond with target audiences, whether from showing appreciation such as thanking a customer for a purchase or requesting an action such as calling for an appointment.  And that is an excellent reason to evaluate how you can add a personal touch to your marketing.

Hand addressing, whether by person or machine, is just one way to stand out. Variable data lets you add personalized information to print or e-mail materials (I get reminders from my vet with my pet’s name and photo on them), a personalized URL, or pURL, can help you deliver tailored information in an individualized website, and the list goes on.  Using a personal touch, for both current clients and when soliciting for new business, yields positive results, which is something we should all look forward to in 2012.

SoLoMo

Just what is this weird word?  SoLoMo is the abbreviation of social/local/mobile and refers to the nexus of where these media functions intersect.  The name and concept really came to be recognized as a growing trend in 2011.

• Social media = the ability for communities to easily connect
• Local media = the geographic range for a community as small in scope, usually no more than 10 miles
• Mobile media = defines the delivery system for the media as coming from a portable device

Why is this important?   You’ve probably already done or at least can appreciate the following:  you’re out running errands and get a craving for tacos, but you’re not sure where you can get one.  Pull out your smartphone and search for tacos.  Voila! Because your smartphone is GPS enabled, you will immediately see choices based on your location, and perhaps a coupon too.  But a business has the responsibility of making sure their listing is complete and correct.  Also important to consider:

• Smartphone growth – half of all Americans will own a smartphone by 2012
• Mobile search has increased 4 times since 2010 and 95% of smartphone users have searched for local information
• The 23 million small businesses in the US will benefit the most by being able to directly connect with prospects and customers by being able to be found on mobile device searches.  And a whopping 60% of searches yield a visit or call to a business after a successful search.

  So what’s coming in 2012?

• Proliferation of new mobile websites for these small businesses
• Improvement of online business information listings
• Increase in mobile PPC marketing

There should also be an increase in providers offering these services to businesses that don’t have time to implement their SoLoMo program themselves.

Group Couponing

This has been popular over the last few years, with hundreds of providers looking for their share of the pie.  Groupon’s recent IPO also raised awareness and enticed first time consumers to get into the game.  But the model is not without its flaws:

• Consumers benefit tremendously with valuable discounts, but can get burned if they can’t redeem the coupon…and the fine print in most of the deals exonerate the couponer from having to make good on the offer if the merchant fails to deliver.
• Small businesses can also lose big time if their offer is too successful and/or the margins are too small to make a profit.  Mega-couponing can also bring in the “wrong” (those that are unlikely to return) customers, damage the brand’s reputation and fail to collect any customer data for future marketing.
• The group coupon companies themselves are very difficult and expensive to run, and there have been many former employees exposing shady dealing, outright deception and terrible working conditions.

So what’s coming in 2012?

2012 should be the make-or-break year for the group couponing model – the kinks really need to get ironed out so all parties feel comfortable about doing business together or the entire segment could wither and die.

Google+

The only thing to really be said for Google+ in 2011 is that it was born.  But it really hasn’t grown.  Not really.  Yes, it has over 40 million users and has been the fastest growing social network in history, but in the six months since rollout, even social super-users aren’t as engaged on Google+ as other networks and there have been few major updates to the service.

The one exception is the introduction of Google+ for businesses, finally allowing entities to stake their claim in the space.  Unfortunately there are few features or benefits yet and quite a few limitations that make the service clunky. Like only allowing one admin for the site, or not offering an easy way to manage followers.

But the potential is huge.  Gigantic. ENORMOUS – especially for businesses.  Considering Google’s near-domination of online search activity (both paid and non) there are so many opportunities that no one else could ever challenge their position.  Just recently, Google began populating search results pages with Google+ pages for some brands.

And that doesn’t even take into account the secret, non-core products from Google like self-driving cars, elevators to outer space and robots.

So what’s coming in 2012?

Google+ is promising streamlined and more robust functionality, and with all the time they are taking to build and launch these new features, it should be significant.  Then again, it could go the way of Google Buzz. RIP.

Only time will tell.

Happy New Year!