The holidays are upon us, and many businesses local and nationwide are gearing up for the Black Friday sales frenzy. Be a savvy shopper and utilize these handy applications in order to find the best deals, compare prices, check to see where your desired item is on sale in your area and more!

How Groundbreaking Thinkers Spread Their Ideas — Inc.com

If you’re an entrepreneur or just a savvy businessperson, you know that knowing how to think critically in order to generate out-of-the-box ideas is a vital skill. However, once you’ve come up with your brilliant pitch, how to you get your audience to come to you? Inc.com’s Jeff Haden has some key concepts to share about the simple logistics of getting your concepts out there and your audience engaged with the message.

Photos Draw Most Facebook Interactions, Links Draw the Least — Small Business SEM

When you’re busily engaging with your fans on Facebook and promoting your online presence, it seems that putting up photos will elicit the most response and engagement on your fans’ parts. Sharing links, however, is the weakest option and comparatively offers very little reward for the effort. The theory makes sense: visual stimulation is always a plus for getting attention, and with the new Facebook UI users can simply click on a posted picture to expand a gallery-style mini-window, eliminating the need to leave Facebook itself. Will you be putting more effort into curating your business’s photo gallery now?

Google+ Rolls Out Trending Topics — Mashable

With Google+ making huge strides in recovering their previously-drooping user base and opening up to the business sphere, it seems evident that they’ve taken a good, hard look at what other social networks are doing well. The introduction of trending topics, a list of the most popular and oft-discussed items on the social network, offers users an effortless peek into the most relevant news of the moment. Several other UI tweaks have been made as well — head over to Mashable to check it out!

8 Tips to Maximize Your Branded Presence in the Google Local Search Results — Bluemnthals

With the recent hubbub over a plethora of Google service redesigns, some may be wondering where to go from here with regard to getting themselves noticed in the local search sphere. Never fear! This handy guide is an excellent overview to making sure your business is front-and-center when searchers are looking for you.

Business Cat approves of your online conduct.

Let’s face it: social media marketing jargon can sound like a different language, especially if you’re wrestling with the eternal question of “What do my Facebook fans want to see? How do I keep them happy?” You know your brand inside and out, so it can be helpful to think of your social media content in the same way you think about your business. Unless you’re a professional trapeze artist, chances are the day-to-day grind of your job can sometimes leave you bored to tears. The same applies to online communities in terms of marketing and promotion. For many of the 800+ million active Facebook users, logging on is habitual and something they’re doing multiple times per day. Facebookers who follow your page don’t want to see the same type of content over and over. That’s the fastest way to turn them off from interacting with your page in a positive way, or at all. The most successful Facebook pages have a give-and-take relationship with their fans. Three things to remember for growing and motivating your online communities:

• Show them you care, you really care! Ensure your newest followers feel valued, appreciated and motivated to interact with your page. Welcome new fans personally, like you would a new co-worker, by tagging them in a welcome message or sending a quick and friendly (non-spammy, of course) direct message.
• Beware of the disgruntled fan. When considering a Facebook contest as a way to gain likes, it’s important to keep in mind the resulting new “Fans” can easily turn on you should they be promised something that is not delivered. These are not the fans you want to attract to your page, as the wreckage they often leave can be detrimental to your brand’s reputation. Many a Facebook page has suffered when the competition gets ugly due to misunderstood rules. Fans can become aggressively competitive, rallying other fans around them. Remember, any competition on Facebook should comply with Facebook’s Promotion Guidelines, or you run the risk of having your page removed entirely. Don’t get me wrong, free stuff is awesome. Offering ‘added value’ as a way to gain more followers has proven successful in the past, but the lines between friendly competition and cut-throat rivalry can be blurred very quickly. There are tons of alternative ways to engage with people, and getting creative with your content doesn’t have to cost money but can work wonders for motivating your online community.

Image macro rewards such as this "Cyber High-5!" seem simple, but can be a great way to motivate interaction and connect with your audience.

• Creative content is king. Organically grow your fan base my keeping existing fans engaged with your page. Think about how you might get your co-workers motivated in the office and apply the same tactics to your Facebook fans. In terms of contests, sometimes the big ticket prize items will only spark jealousy and animosity among the group. Often a much smaller scale pat on the back will do the trick. Consider running a weekly trivia contest with a funny, motivating and free (for you) prize like a “cyber high-5” or an original Internet meme. Instead of gaining a bunch of superficial ‘Likes,’ your fans will engage, comment and even share your content with their own friends.

Lighthearted, fun content will ensure you and your Facebook fans’ interactions are positive and mutually beneficial. Keep the fans you have engaged and your number of ‘Likes’ is bound to keep climbing.

The SI Blog sends a special thanks to Lauren Litwinka for her insight and contribution to this post. Lauren is an Account Manager at aimClear where she’s pretty awesome at online community management.

Since Facebook’s native markup of a combination of HTML and XML can be clunky and very limited (especially when it comes to more sophisticated elements like Javascript), iframes offer a sleeker approach to Facebook brand display. They pull content directly from a business’s site, so that traditional HTML and the aforementioned advanced elements can be utilized to create a much more multi-faceted approach to drawing in eyeballs both before and after the “like.” Additionally, multiple tabs can be created within the frame, allowing for a customized complexity not normally seen in the basic FB layout. These tabs can offer different aspects of the business such as a “thank-you for liking” display, locations, specials, and forms.

As most Facebook users simply “like and forget,” this kind of direct data can draw traffic to the business’s page instead of its Facebook. Since the third-party content exists on a familiar platform, though, it can function as a preliminary landing page, easing the users in to getting to know the brand or service. The more dynamic aspect of the frame tabs also makes it easier to track page views and user behavior. In turn, targeting demographics by aspects such as location, sex, age and interests is made simpler as well — something that anyone with an interest in Facebook marketing is surely invested in.

On a more surface-level aspect, this approach is simply more engaging to the user than passive newsfeed updates. There are over 750 million users on Facebook (150 million + in the US alone), and maintaining a strong presence is a must for any social media-savvy brand. The updates can be informational (such as special offers and exclusives shown directly from the website onto the viewer’s feed), but also allows for direct interaction in the form of contests, mailing list sign-ups and other conversion points from viewer to participator.

It was an educational afternoon at Search Influence, and we thank Anthony for his hard work putting together his presentation! He’s got an upcoming blog post on more Facebook tactics, and you can bet that future Lunch & Learns will be written up right here. In the meantime, you can check out his heroic (and informative!) presentation here.

I think not. The red flag that popped in my head when I got the news via e-mail was not that my pride was hurt by losing my title, but that this is likely an issue across the board for Foursquare advertisers.

If you aren’t familiar with the concept of Foursquare or would like more information about how to conduct local business marketing on Foursquare, check out our previous blog post on the subject. The basic gist of mayorship is that a Foursquare user becomes mayor of an establishment by “checking in” more than anyone else in the previous 60 days.

Naturally, an owner or manager of a business is going to be at his place of business more than most customers (clearly there are exceptions to this), so, considering the fact that Foursquare is a “game,” would it be considered cheating for the owner to check in? Probably not, but it may be a good business and marketing decision to sit back and just be an observer when it comes to Foursquare competition on your home turf, especially if you are actively using it as a marketing tool.

This also brings up the question of whether or not your employees should check in when they come to work. Say an employee is the mayor and has 50 check-ins in the last 60 days, I’m not going to be motivated to compete for mayorship.

One Starbucks patron, as eater.com reported, was so appalled that a barista became mayor of one of the coffee giant’s locations that she filed a complaint with the company.

If you want to have a competition between employees of who works more, than that’s one thing. If you want to encourage customers to compete with each other for mayorship, and hence, come back again and again to defend their position, then it’s time for employees to just say no to Foursquare at work.

In addition to mayorial competitions encouraging top competitors to return to your business, an added bonus is that each time a user overtakes another as the mayor of your business, it is posted to each of the individual’s Facebook wall. Voilà! Free marketing.

While Starbucks basically told the disgruntled customer that there was nothing they could do, as marketing-oriented person, I would suggest highly encouraging your employees to keep it fair for the customers, because really, for most, there’s no bragging rights in being the mayor of your place of employment anyway. It’s likely that the check-ins of your employees would make it practically impossible for any customer, even a regular, to stand a chance to become mayor, and squashes that marketing and competition aspect of Foursquare for your business.

It’s also similar to other outlets in such ways that you connect to people you know by adding them as a “friend,” but past that, this new location-based app sets itself apart by integrating the service into everyday activities, being primarily mobile-based, and serving as a “tap and go” app, with which it  doesn’t take much longer to interact than it does to send a text message to a friend letting them know where you’re having your coffee.

Foursquare’s goal is to make you more social, not less, by encouraging users to go from place to place by way of “checking in” to each restaurant, bar, coffee shop (or even doctors’ office, store, airport) that they visit. Upon checking into a venue, a user sees who is currently the mayor (who has checked in here more than anyone else), and who recently checked in to that location. At any point in time, a user can see a list of their friends and where their friends have checked into recently, with an emphasis put on friends in your city, and pushing those in other cities to the bottom of the list. The idea behind this is that seeing where your friend in Denver is checking in doesn’t contribute to your foursquare community if you’re in Savannah.

Users get “badges” for certain behavior such as checking into the same place three times a week (“local” badge) or going to four different venues in one night (“crunked” badge).

So, what does all of this mean for your local business marketing? Some larger businesses at this point have had the opportunity to have badges related to check ins to their business added to the system. While we haven’t found if this feature will be available to small businesses in the future, we hope that it will, because badges are one of the big ways users can be encouraged to patronize and check in at YOUR business.

For now, though, the local business marketing benefits are still great, and, most importantly, FREE! By going to foursquare.com, you can sign up your business to offer a foursquare special. So, when a user checks into a business within a block or two of your location, a “Specials Nearby” icon will pop up, on which they can click to see that your nearby business is offering a free bottle of wine on someone’s fourth check-in on foursquare, or a free pizza for the mayor. This means you get to market directly to people who shop and do business near your location already, who are already more likely to hit up your location than they are a similar business across town. Foursquare specials are also a way to reward loyal regulars. You can offer “free upgrade on every fourth check in”  or “complimentary dessert on your 10th check in.”

Each time an individual checks in to your business is a little free slice of marketing pie. By way of check-ins, users are telling their friends “I love the coffee at The Daily Brew!” and most of the time, users literally are telling their friends exactly what they like at a certain business by adding a comment that says something like “Iced Vanilla Latte – best in the city!” Small businesses can encourage patrons to pass the word on foursquare about a certain product by offering something to those who add a comment to their check-in or leaving a “tip” for a particular business.

If you don’t want to solicit tips or check-in comments, you can still use them to your advantage by going to your business’s page on foursquare and seeing what people are saying about your business, its products, its atmosphere, etc. It’s your ticket to un-biased reviews! The most important part of this is to make use of the information you discover. Even the simplest thing as someone mentioning “bring a power strip if your planning to use your laptop,” can help you make your business more comfortable for patrons that enjoy working at your business, who are most likely to become regulars, if they aren’t already.

While foursquare’s website and this post may allude to foursquare being geared towards the food and beverage industry, it really can be used for all places of business. Think retail customers leaving tips about sales, patients leaving comments about how quickly and smoothly their visit to the doctor was, or guests talking about how helpful the concierge service at your hotel is.

No matter who you are or what you offer, you can put foursquare to work in your local business marketing plan!

Thanks to dpstyles and psmith for the great images.

There are a ton of reputable charities out there and donating to anyone of them is admirable, but many of these organizations have no way of showing you the effect that your donation has had on the life of its recipient. SeeYourImpact is a network that enables visitors to make small donations to reputable charities and directly see the impact they have made on the world through the use of testimonials, photos and videos.

Their goal is to impact billions of people one donation at a time. The technology they use transforms giving into a joyful and fulfilling experience by enabling charitable organizations to show the connection of each donor’s gift to the actual end beneficiary in an authentic and transparent manner. 100% of your donation goes to the charitable organization of your choice. As of now, their reach extends only to India, but as they grow will make their services available to Africa, Latin America, and the rest of the world.

I really admire and respect not only what they are attempting to do, but also the means in which they are achieving their goals. Gone are the days of Sally Struthers and mail-in updates. SeeYourImpact utilizes current technological advances to deliver personal and real stories of the people who receive your much-needed donations.

The impact is vast, as you can see in this video of Madavan’s Story. Some of the causes supported are tuition fees for schooling, solar lanterns to provide electricity, Braille lessons for the blind, and even cataract surgery to restore someone’s vision. The donation size is also easily affordable to most people. I may be coming across as a salesman for these guys, but that’s just a testament to their impact and how much I support what they’re doing. I’ve never given to a charity before, believing I was a charity case myself. However, after reading how far simply $12 can go (a month of tuition for a needy child), I felt obligated to contribute. I mean, it’s twelve bucks. Who can’t afford to swing that? There I go being a salesman again. Just stop my ramblings and at the very least become their fan on Facebook. Even if you aren’t able to give directly, maybe you could indirectly inspire someone who can.

Studies have shown that not only do long customer stories (2.5 times longer than reviews) lead to increased, more relevant search results, but increasing website interactivity with fresh, real-world content like customer questions and answers can increase sales conversions and lower customer service costs. For some business owners online reviews have become far more useful than the traditional print yellow pages and savvy business owners have figured out proactive ways to use online review sites.

But there are concerns that Google is now trying to dominate the local search landscape with new developments, some of which place user reviews at the heart of their new features. Google’s new browser add-on called “Sidewiki” allows anyone to contribute comments about any web page. According to Google, Sidewiki entries use an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals developed.

How Google uses these entries to rank web pages remains to be seen, but most marketers agree that the impacts of this are far reaching, because it includes every web page on the internet in Google’s own social network, with consumer opinion – both positive and negative – displayed every time a user opens a web page. With this new feature, Google has shifted power firmly away from corporate web teams and placed it in the hands of the consumer.

The good thing is that Sidewiki entries are tied to a Google profile. There’s no guarantee that the profile isn’t bogus, but the advantage is that no anonymous entries are allowed. Also, Google will analyze language so that “stupid comments” are automatically discounted or removed.

Some marketers surmise that user profiles will be moderated by a quality algorithm, so more influential, active or powerful users, with more powerful Google Profiles or Personal PageRank, will have more influence in the comments. This is very likely the case, as measurements of Twitter influence have demonstrated in the past. It’s usually a small minority of influencers who create the most comments and influence the majority of users.

So how do businesses make use of this feature? The same way they bring newly-created linkbait to the notice of influential bloggers – by cultivating customer evangelists and monitoring social networks for influential voices and alerting them to content that is interesting and valuable. Sidewiki is just another way for Google to introduce a new feature of quality control into its already formidable algorithm and ensure that SEO and website promotion experts don’t get too complacent with their efforts.

You will want to search for your company + geo modifier.

For example, “Search Influence, New Orleans, LA” will get me here:

When I click on “More information,” I land on the business’ Google map listing with all manner of data that consumers love:

Click on “Link” in the upper right corner – it’s small, but it’s there – and the popup box indicates the Place page link:

Did all of that and still don’t find your Places link?

If you followed the steps above, and your Places link is not a friendly URL, your listing likely is not yet the authoritative one.  It should look like the model – http://maps.google.com/places/us/city/name-st/#/-full-business-name -

The first thing you need to do, is look for other listings in your business name.  These can be …

1)   another business squatting on your company name (dirty dogs!)

2)   forgotten listings that are simply duplications:

Either way the least authoritative listing needs to be suspended in the Google Local Business Center to make the real listing stand up.  To paraphrase the immortal word of Eminem, “Will the real Google listing, please stand up, please stand up, please stand up?”

If you don’t have duplicate listings on any variation of the name or duplicates on address, you should try to manually create the Places page using the standardized format per Mike Blumenthall:

http://maps.google.com/places/us/city/name-st/#/-full-business-name

Watch for derivatives of Street, St, Lane, Ln, etc.

It may take a little of your time to get it straight in Google Local Business Center, but to be the authority on your Google map listing and to own your friendly Places page URL is invaluable to a small business, and well worth a little effort.

It was a good time and I’m hopeful to see it evolve into something worth doing.

More from the Social Media Club of New Orleans:

• Social Media Club New Orleans | Facebook
• Official Blog of New Orleans Social Media Club
• Social Media Club, New Orleans, on Twitter (in development apparently)