Social media is communication 2.0. Leverage your consumer base so that customers become your personal sales team — nothing sells more or increases customer loyalty and engagement better than the voice of other customers. Social media takes word of mouth marketing  into the digital sphere as customers peruse the Internet for twitpics of the best pulled pork sandwich or the latest blog post about an Italian restaurant from a favourite foodie.

If you’re thinking of taking that dive into the social media deep end, here are some reasons you should incorporate social media into your small business strategy.

Customers can be your friends
For years consumers have been fighting a battle against advertisers – we were sick of being sold to from a faceless corporation and want to be treated like humans. Social media allows businesses to do that. Like the corner store your grandpa visited as a little boy or the butcher who knows you by first name, social media allows businesses to invoke a sense of community. Engage your customers in a conversation. Let them see the human side of the business. Leverage the community to gauge interest about new products, keep them up-to-date about events and let them know about specials before the regular public. Talk with, not at.

It’s cheap
Forget about buying that ad space in the newspaper or sending your intern out on the street with a sandwich board. Social media allows businesses to gain exposure for little or no money at all. Create a Facebook page, sign up for a Twitter account, establish a WordPress blog – all free. The only real investment is time. Interacting with your customers on these platforms can put them to work for you. They can spread the word about your great product or service by engaging their own social networks through yours. Ultimately, they help you expand your reach far beyond what you could have done with traditional advertising.

Responsiveness
Take off those rose-coloured glasses. Not everything that your customers say will be positive. It’s up to you as the business owner to respond to everything, even the bad stuff. Be ready to deal constructively with any negative exposure. The key to this is to be participating in and guiding a two-way conversation. Hootsuite is a great way to easily monitor several accounts, as well as understand perceptions and sentiments about your organization or service. Customers appreciate accessibility, transparency, and openness.

Stake out the competition
Staying competitive is the key to success in any industry. Social media can help you improve your knowledge base about your industry and interact with other movers and shakers in your industry. Network with those on the cutting edge and stay ahead of trends by tracking all the buzz within the industry. Stalk Twitter feeds, blogs and Facebook pages. Compile a list of important Twitter users and bloggers in your industry or come up with a list of keywords to track in Google alerts and bring the info to you.

Expound your unique product
While some of us may employ an army of clones, not everyone has the time  to  speak to each and every individual customer that walks in through the door. If you have a unique product that you are passionate about, social media allows you to extend your voice across time and space. Share pictures, videos or behind-the-scene looks that regular consumers would not be able to access anywhere else. Allow your social media platforms to be that unique place to share exclusive content and encourage others to share their own.

Twitter has become one of the most popular and most powerful social media platforms. When used successfully, Twitter can expand the reach of your brand and your organization. By leveraging the social networks of others, companies are taking advantage of Twitter’s marketing potential. Generating a large network of followers is the key to reaching your target audience, but it isn’t as simple as following others and crossing your fingers and hoping that they follow you back.

Here are some tips about ways to get more Twitter followers:

Link it
Generate consistency throughout all your social media channels by providing links to your Twitter profile on LinkedIn, Facebook, your blog and your email signature. People have to know you exist on Twitter before they can even start following you.

Hash it
#Hashtagging keywords ensures other users who are searching up those terms can easily find you. Check out search.twitter.com for trending topics and jump into the conversation. If you attend conferences and events, find out in advance what the hashtag is — this is a great way to network with fellow attendees.

We <3 pix
People are very visual consumers and pictures are heavily retweeted and spread around. If you love eating out, other foodies love to see pictures of what you’re eating, for example. As with links, ow.ly provides a great way to track how many people viewed your photo and how often it was passed along.

Monkey see, monkey do
Follow the top Twitter users in your area and watch what and how they tweet. Pay close attention, not only to the content they send out, but also to the tone of their messages.

Know your niche
Knowing how and where you fit into specific interest groups ensures your tweets are reaching the most relevant target audience. Have a targeted audience in mind and tailor your messages towards its interests and ideas. The ultimate goal is to be an expert in your niche so that you become the go-to person.

Retweeting
Encourage existing followers to retweet your links. It expands your reach beyond your own social network, resulting in clicks back to your profile. Using a URL shortener, like ow.ly, provides a good way to track your success.

Tweet during peak hours
Just because you’re nocturnal doesn’t mean the rest of your Twitter followers are. Send tweets during peak hours to give you the best opportunity to be seen and read. While there haven’t been any studies yet, your best bet for peak traffic is around the time people are getting to work, taking breaks and getting off work — 9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. If these hours don’t work for you, Hootsuite allows you to set scheduled tweets so you can share the latest Lonely Island video while you’re catching up on your life.

Ask, ask, and ask some more
Ask questions. Get people engaged in a conversation to encourage two-way communication. Be in the know  about hot news items and top headlines and poll your followers. Ask who is going to win American Idol? or what do you think about those sweater vests Harper wears. Would you vote for Donald Trump if he ran for president? Questions can generate hundreds of responses and each response is seen by anyone who follows the responder, thus expanding your reach.

No one likes a try-hard
Stop thinking of Twitter as purely a marketing tool. The idea of social media is just that — social. It’s about two-way communication. People like to know that there’s a human behind a computer screen and they don’t want to be sold to all the time. Have fun and engage in conversations and discussions. Your customers will join you because they want to connect to a person, not a brand.

Free stuff is great
Try putting together a contest or a giveaway. People love free stuff. Encourage people to follow and RT in order to be entered to win. Make sure you have a killer prize that your followers would be interested in winning (and not that sweater your grandma gave you for your birthday). While this strategy is short-term in scope, incorporating a few of the other tips we’ve listed above will ensure that your followers stay beyond the life of the contest.

Mo’ money, mo’ followers?
If you’re lazy, just buy them. But we don’t recommend it. Having an active, engaged community is more valuable than having a big list of followers that don’t care about you or your organization.

We asked Julia Stowell, open source community and marketing manager for Microsoft, to tell us a bit more about Open Source Week. Stowell has ten years of IT industry experience, specifically at Microsoft. She has experience in marketing and community management and business and market analysis.

How did the idea for Open Source Week come about?

… This is our (Microsoft’s) third time hosting Make Web Not War.  Last year we held the event in Montreal and as part of the lead up to our event we helped to organize an Open Source Week in Montreal.  When we were  visiting Vancouver last October for the Drupal Summit we asked the tech community if they’d be interested in having an Open Source Week. They were enthusiastic and supportive and so we continued the conversation.  And here we are.  The community in Vancouver is awesome and we’re thrilled to have been part of the creation of  the first Open Source Week in Vancouver.

Why are you passionate about Open Source Week?

I’m passionate about it because it helped me to get involved and get to know the local tech community.

What do you think specific events happening during Open Source Week will achieve?

This is a great opportunity to have people come together that don’t normally talk to each other.  There are many brilliant people that need to meet each other.

What impact do you think Open Source Week is going to have in the long and short term?

Both long and short term, I think it will trigger more mingling, learning, and networking between the various open source communities.

Which event and which speaker are you most looking forward to hearing from?

Well, I’m partial, but Make Web Not War — specifically my session (LOL),  which is a panel on Microsoft and Open Source.

Questions with CT Moore

CT Moore is  a senior strategist at NVI, where he handles client SEO, PPC, and social media. He is also a blogger, journalist, podcaster, and speaker and has more than five years of experience in SEO. He consulted on web strategy for brands, such asAmerican Apparel, Yellow Pages, and Microsoft, as well as a number of media start-ups.  He also sits as a staff editor at Revenews.com. Moore will be talking about technical SEO for enterprise level & dynamic websites at Make Web Not War, with Mohamed Hamad.

What do you love about WordPress?

Well, there are probably two things about WordPress that I love. The first is that it’s free. I first encountered WordPress back in 2006. I wanted a blog, but was too cheap and broke to higher someone to build it for me. So after some Googling around, I found Wordpress. At the time, I didn’t even know what an FTP client was, and it took me two weeks to figure out how to properly install and configure it. But I would’ve never started my web dev education it wasn’t for WordPress being free. Just goes to show that freedom is power

The other thing I love about WordPress is how versatile it is. I mean, you can use it to build a blog or static website, or you can use it build a small ecommerce store.

The open  source community behind WordPress has resulted in so many different plugins, add-ons and themes that you do just about anything with it. Come to think of it, WordPress’s versatility is owed to the WordPress community so I guess it’s the community I love.

What impact is do you think WordPress is going to have on open source platforms moving forward?

I think, if anything, WordPress has demonstrated the power of communities. Like I said, WordPress’s versatility is owed to the community behind it, so I think that open source developers will really be forced to invest in their community when developing platforms. It’s that kind of crowdsourcing that streamlines new releases and bug fixes, and it’s that kind of crowdsourcing that can take a platform to a level where it’s a viable and dependable business options.

What do you think are some of the most relevant web technologies coming up for 2011/2012?

I guess pretty much anything mobile. Obviously, Android is huge, and is going to continue to influence what developers choose to develop.

I also think it’ll be interesting to watch the development of Window Phone 7 (disclosure: through NVI, I currently work with Microsoft Canada and worked on the Great Canadian Apportunity mobile dev contest with them). The deal between Nokia and Microsoft has a lot of potential. Nokia makes great hardware but needed a really strong OS, and Windows Phone 7 needs quick marketing penetration. If consumers buy into the Windows Phone 7 platform via Nokia, it’ll definitely have a significant impact on mobile developers.

Why are you passionate about open source platforms?

The freedom, versatility, and possibility they afford us. Open source technologies afford people the tools and experience that they couldn’t get if they had to pay for licenses. As I mentioned already, I learned about web dev because of WordPress.

But being free from licensing constraints and having access to the source code also allows people to take something that is only partially what they’re looking for, and customize it to their needs. That can save you countless hours in product development and make the impossible otherwise possible.

But “the possibilities” go so far beyond that. The idea of having a strong community of sharp minds collectively working on a platform means that the technology can evolve very quickly and in so many ways.

Just imagine where WordPress would be today if Matt Mullenweg had been trying to make money off of it as a licensed solutions. He’d only have a small team of developers working inside the box, and WordPress would’ve never evolved the way it had. Instead, you have thousands of developers finding bug fixes, developing plugins, and making themes so that WordPress can be used in so many different ways. And the result is that a lot of business get started or save a lot of money on what they otherwise might not have been able to do.

I honestly believed that open source is one of those paradoxes where everyone gets richer because something is free. It opens the door to so many possibilities and minds to so much inspiration.

Questions with Morten Rand-Hendriksen.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is creative director for Pink & Yellow Media. He is a web designer, developer and educator and specializes in remarkably customized and unusual WordPress themes. He is also an author for Pearson publishing and Lynda.com and has published three books and two video series on web design and WordPress. He enjoys writing about anything and everything web related on the his blog Design is Philosophy. He loves web standards, information design and making the web make sense for everyone. He recently launched  PhotoPivot.com with Chris Arnold. PhotoPivotcreate a digital lightboard for professional photographers by using the Microsoft Pivot application. His topic for the Make Web Not War conference is: open source in the cloud – PHP on Azure.

What do you think is the most misunderstood thing about SEO?

SEO as a service is a bit of a scam (cue flame war). In the past you could game the search engines to get a better ranking. That just doesn’t work any more. Today search engines are simply too smart. If you want good search engine ranking (SER?) what matters is well written and well formatted content. In my opinion you’re better off buying the services of a great copywriter than getting an “SEO expert” to look over your content.

If you could suggest one thing to improve someone’s SEO, what would it be?

Focus on proper markup (page title, description, headers etc.) and put some effort in attaching accurate and descriptive alt tags to your images. Images are largely overlooked and search engines – being text driven – don’t understand them. Simply tagging your images with a proper description will make a huge difference in your findability.

What do you think are some of the most relevant web technologies coming up for 2011/2012?

Cloud, pure and simple. As solutions become more advanced and people need more space, faster transfers and larger pipes the old world of static servers and shared hosting will quickly be supplanted for the new and more agile cloud system. Yes, it’s more complicated, but the payoff is immense both in lower cost-to-performance, better stability and the benefits of a properly distributed network.

Why are you passionate about open source platforms?

In Norwegian we have a word “dugnad”. Translated to English it would mean something like “work done voluntarily by the community for the common good.” Open source is that – dugnad on a massive scale. To me open source is what the internet is and should be about: people working together for a common good. Open source is crowd sourced innovation on a scale not possible when run by an organization or a corporation. The ability for everyone to pitch in and add the little details they think matter produces an organic evolutionary process that often ends up with things no one ever thought of before. Sure, open source also produces a lot of garbage, but it’s easily balanced out.

What impact do you think open source is going to have on the web in the long term?

If we jump back in time we see open source as this fringe element written off as a joke by the people in power. Now we see open source leading the way and taking over for proprietary solutions. This organic collaborative environment can easily be the way forward for both the web and society as a whole as long as we, the people who work in it, keep our bearings and focus on innovation and betterment.

* This blog post is part of Invoke’s participation in the 2008 Vancouver Blogathon for Charity

Invoke has always had a holistic approach to the internet. Creating a nice website for someone is a good thing, but that’s not enough. Strategy and creation are critical to produce a product, but promotion and marketing are what justify the creation of the product. Simply put, if you build it and nobody comes, there wasn’t really any point in building it in the first place. Realizing this, Invoke was active in web 1.0 marketing channels such as Search Engine Marketing, Online ad buying, and email marketing. Web 2.0 has vastly expanded the 1.0 channel mix for online marketing through newer offerings like blogging, video (viral), microblogging/twitter, social networking sites, facebook applications / open social applications etc.

Search is good. It provides a way for people to get the content they need fast, however as online users become more savvy they become less reliant on search as their sole destination. The advent of blogging, social networking, and niche social networking allows users to get connected to friends, access content that is more tailored to what they are looking for and ultimately reduces dependence on “traditional” search (google/yahoo). Google, Yahoo and MSN know that ultimately they need to acquire viewers (and clickers) for their advertising. As these users rely less on search, search engines need to extend their network reach which explains many of the acquisitions we see.

So if search engines are extending into these 2.0 marketing channels it arguably makes good sense for advertisers and marketers to be there as well. Banner advertising is one method and probably the easiest, but it is not enough. Marketers need to think more about a cohesive campaign strategy that incorporates all channels in a way that is more engaging than a “look at me > buy me” advertising model. This conversation and interaction is what 2.0 channels efficiently allow for; creative, well executed campaigns using these channels is the challenge that marketers, advertisers and agencies need solve. Good luck!