But its not the same as having your own branded  smart phone app. In this economy not many want to shellout $10,000 or even $5000.00 for these apps.

NOW you don’t have to. For under $1000.00  Appinklingallows you to have a branded image for both the I phone and Android phones. This now allows your customers and potential customers to see who you are and what you do without having to find a computer and looking you up. Self help guru’s you needs this… Service oriented business’s should find this as a must have to proclaim themselves to the world… Artists, Authors, Publishers and especially Musicians should all have one of these. There is alot of flexibility in the template offered by Applink. Also to get placed in front of other customers just mention to them you heard about this from Seth Crofton at Smmeenow and you will get placed in front of the line.

So the uses of QR codes are vast but this was a great idea in using them as graffito. Now of course graffiti is frowned upon but think of the many flyer’s you see downtown advertising bands/activities/groups and performances. And if your at a convention what a great way to get people to see what you have to offer by placing a few of these as posters up on the walls to the convention area.

Your Size Works in Your Favor

As a small business, your size is your friend in social media channels. Use your small size as an advantage and respond to each and every person that mentions you. Since you’re working with a smaller customer base, you can also build customer Twitter Lists to separate different categories of customers into groups, which should help you offer more personalized customer service — something the big businesses don’t have the time or resources to support.

Here’s an easy example: Who are your most frequent customers? Make a Twitter List called “Regulars,” and add your regulars on Twitter to it.

In doing so, you’re associating patronage with prestige. Your efforts could even inspire semi-regular customers to frequent your business more often just so they too can get added to the list. This tactic might also serve as a catalyst for one regular to connect with another, though you could also facilitate customer-to-customer connections with introductory tweets. So if a customer tweets for a recommendation, you could respond with something simple as, “@customer1 good question, I like the cheesecake but @customer2 really loves the custard.”

These types of personal exchanges highlight the advantages afforded to small businesses using social media

Social media marketing and social networking are superb marketing tools…. if they’re used right. Use them wrong and they’re a major waste of time.

If you’re one of those people who say “Tried it. Social media doesn’t work for my business.”, here are sixteen reasons why you might not be seeing success:

1. You don’t have a plan.

Social media is marketing, and successful marketing requires a plan. Scattershot tweeting or posting is a waste of time and effort.

2.  You don’t have a goal (you would if you had a plan).

What do you want to accomplish with your posts and tweets? Visibility for your business? Roll out of a new product? Drive traffic to your website? Establish yourself as an expert? Get people to your workshops? You need to know what you want to achieve before you start. How else do you know what to talk about?

3. You don’t have a target audience that you want to engage (yep, you would if you had a plan!). Pretty tough to know what to post if you don’t know what your followers are interested in.

4. You’re all about self-promotion.

This is about as effective as thinking networking is all about telling everyone why they should buy from you. If the bulk of your posts include “I” or “me”, fix them. Fast!

5.  You don’t get the “social” part of social media/networking.

Being social requires some sort of interaction…..like sharing and connecting. Commenting on other people’s posts, retweeting, sharing posts that you find interesting, sharing posts that might help someone else, responding when a friend asks a question. If you’re not doing that, you’re doing “solo” media. Lots of luck with that!

 6.  You’re not following anyone.

I don’t go along with the “follow everyone who follows you” theory, but I do know that I learn a lot from following the right people (those who tweet about what I’m interested in or fun quirky things). So I’m always looking for interesting people to follow. And I periodically go through my new followers to see if I want to follow them in return.

7.  You’re boring people.

If your posts aren’t of interest to your followers, why should they follow you? Or recommend that others follow you? Your network will stagnate.

Make your posts and tweets Interesting, timely and relevant.

If your goal is to gain visibility as a real estate expert, talk about real estate issues and news. Trends you’re seeing (or reading about). Helpful tips for prospective buyers. Things that new homeowners need to know. Posts that will get real estate reporters to follow you.

And don’t be afraid to throw in the occasional quirky post just to make it fun. Posts that make people smile get shared.

8.  You’re inconsistent.

It’s not necessary to tweet daily….but it doesn’t hurt. I’ve read some tip sheets that say 4x /day is optimum but that’s assuming you have something of value to tweet about.

Watch the people who have lots of followers, and see what they tweet about and how often. Same goes for Facebook. Don’t post and then disappear for a month. Your followers will do the same.

And don’t forget that your ranking in Google is affected by Twitter and Facebook. The more you tweet and post, the more Google finds you and the higher you appear in search.

9.  You over post and tweet endlessly.

Ever opened your Twitter feed only to find eight tweets in a row from one person? Then you know what I mean. Try and space your tweets out during the day. Don’t inundate your followers. You’ll lose them.

10. You’ve turned social media over to an intern or an employee who doesn’t “get” marketing or understand what you do. Bad move.

11. You’re outsourcing social media to someone who doesn’t understand what your company does and what you want to achieve. Equally bad move, not to mention a waste of money.

12.  You forgot about keywords.                        

One of the coolest things about Facebook and Twitter is that your posts and tweets get picked up by Google. This not only gives you more visibility but moves your rankings up.

You should be using keywords since new followers will use them to find you. This means using them in your profiles as well as your posts.

13.  You’re using an auto responder to thank people for following you.

I don’t think I’m alone in saying that this is using Twitter to spam. If I’m following you, I’m doing so because I think you’ll tweet about things that interest me. Cluttering up my feeds with messages that say “thanks for following me” or “have a good day” are nice and all but hold no value. They’re automatically generated so it’s not like you’re sending them to connect with me. It’s just one more tweet to delete.

14. You’re pretending to connect but you’re really all about selling.

I had this happen to me the other day. After receiving a nice invite to connect (to which I responded and mentioned what a nice message it was), I got a generic sales pitch the next day. And my new follower got blocked.

15. You’re not being authentic.                                                         Authenticity and transparency are two of the key attributes for a solid social media/social networking connection. Try and portray yourself as someone you’re not, and you’ll get called on it. 

16. You’re not big on sharing.

Since that’s pretty much what social networking is all about, if you ‘re not into sharing, you shouldn’t be here.

By no means is this a complete list, but it’s a good starting point.

If you’re doing any of the above, you’re sabotaging your social media efforts. Start over and do it right. Or don’t do it at all. You’ll free up a ton of time.

$20 Facebook Campaign

Metric	Amount
Impressions	43,689
CPC	0.117%
Clicks	51
RSVPS	8
RSVP Maybes	17
Pending responses	55
Ave CPC	$0.39
Time period	2 days

Money spent $20.00

Now this was also a targeted campaign in that the viewers of this simple add were to be within 50 miles of the Portland Oregon area. But take a look at the hits/clicks, and RSVPs . The average person on Facebook has around 180 friends. So each of the 8 Rasp’s just reached out to 1440 people ( 8 x180) and the RSVPs maybe reached out to 3060 people ( 17 x 180) . Now we don’t know each one’s privacy settings so we would need to assume that they are open to let their friends now of what they have done and in doing so point out the vendor/company to all their friends.

Very simple, easy and cost effective. It also took all of 20 minutes or so to do.

So if you have not tried Facebook ads to work with your Facebook fan-site I strongly suggest you do. It beats reading an expensive magazine with expensive coffee. Those never get you any sales.

We here at Smmee have spoke in the past of the future of the Internet going from saturation to localization. Myspace preceded by Second Life has experienced this last year and is trying to re invent itself. Virtual worlds like Habbo.com and social media platforms like Ning.com have entrenched themselves in their niches and have been successful. Disney is embracing social media and virtual worlds to the point where it is re modeling their theme parks to incorporate it. But where does the future lay?

I believe it will lay in localization. Where users will play online in smaller fields of social media that revolve around who they are in the real world. They will spend far more time in forums that arouse their interests, loves and beliefs. We still see Facebook being the giant whitepages in the sky but it can only grow so far. So taking that in mind take a look at this great article  from I wanna Express with User generated content stats and forecasts and see where you can best put your companies brand online.

But they don’t go out of their way to advertise it.

DeLorean as you can see does go out of their way to show you where online you can find them and the coolest car of the 80s. YouTube and Facebook are boldly shown and they have done some interesting low cost fan contests. They also effectively utilize their Facebook fansite with these contests. If you hurry you can get into their latest contest, a paper DeLorean, by Dec, 31st.

So take a look at these two brands and your own company and see how best you can utilize social media or not utilize it. Do you have a strong enough fan base to let them go ahead and worship your product or do you need to motivate and support you fans? Just remember to make 2010 a strong marketing year for our rebounding economy and from all of us at Smmee have a great New Year!

Now the Leno show is a big experiment for NBC according to the press. Its cheaper to produce compared to hour long drama’s or comedies and its a known brand. The different time slot has proven to be tough but Leno has persisted. In fact when he started doing the tonight show his ratings were horrible for the first three years so he knows to stay persistent. And its great to see that they are trying to be innovative by going after user generated content from the web. So if NBC can do it with the Jay Leno show why can’t your company do the same? There are lots of quirky talent out there that is screaming to be seen and is very cost effective.