Scott Design received four Communicator Awards in a competition honoring creative excellence among professionals worldwide.

An Award of Excellence recognized Scott Design’s work on the website for CTW, which provides resources for church leaders. The website, created in WordPress blogging software, won in the Cultural Blog category.

Scott Design received an Award of Distinction in the Financial Services category for its work on the website for New York-based venture capital firm Braemar Energy Ventures. The website features an interactive timeline and pop-up portfolio.

Two additional Awards of Distinction recognized Scott Design’s Augmented Reality Snowstorm, an online application featured in the firm’s own 2009 holiday greeting. This Flash application, which lets users put themselves in an imaginary snowstorm using a computer webcam, won in the Motion Graphics category.

With thousands of entries received from throughout the United States and around the world, the Communicator Awards is the largest and most competitive awards program honoring the creative excellence of communications professionals. The Communicator Awards is an annual competition honoring the best in advertising, corporate communications, public relations and identity work for print, video, interactive and audio. Please visit www.communicatorawards.com for more information.

For the latest information on recent awards, visit the Design Awards page.

WordPress is a great platform for creating your blog, but should you create your entire website using WordPress? Having created both blogs and entire sites on WordPress before, we’ve learned that there are some good reasons to use WordPress to create your website, and some good reasons to use another solution.

Here’s a quick rundown of the good, the bad, and our experience using WordPress to create websites.

Software: Frequent upgrades, plenty of plug-ins, large user base

• Good: WordPress is an open-source project and there are plenty of developers, so security flaws get patched quickly and new features and plug-ins appear regularly. The large, helpful community of users can help you fix problems. If you’ve had the problem, chances are, someone else has too.
• Bad: Plug-ins can sometimes stop working when you upgrade WordPress to the latest version. Since plug-ins are often developed by individuals, mostly volunteers, fixes aren’t always done immediately.

Functionality: Built-in search, search engine optimization (SEO)

• Good: WordPress has a built-in search function and facilitates SEO. The search function is easily added to all pages of your site. WordPress allows you to tag all contents, create custom keyword-rich URLs, and allow trackbacks and pingbacks, all of which help your site to be found in online searches.
• Bad: WordPress search is limited — results are sorted by date, not relevance, and there are no advanced searching options. For a more robust search function, you should install Google Site Search on your WordPress website.

Platform: Based on PHP and MySQL

• Good: Allows experienced developers to completely customize sites.
• Bad: Not as easy to customize for non-developers or those who know only HTML. WordPress has its own PHP syntax and functions that create a bit of a learning curve, even for experienced PHP coders. Also, you can’t just preview a post in your browser without having a WordPress testing server set up.

Design: Plenty of templates

• Good: Even if you don’t hire a designer to customize your site, there are enough templates so your site won’t look like everyone else’s site.
• Bad: The templates are not designed to further your brand. You may find one that is similar to your current branding, but it won’t match exactly. You might want to start with a simple template, which takes care of a lot of the drudge work of setting up the site. Then, to customize the template to match your branding, you definitely should be (or hire) a web designer/developer. If you want to make some pages in your site look significantly different from a regular “blog” structure, you will need to spend a lot of time working with style sheets and PHP.

Updates: Content Management System (CMS)

• Good: Can be used as a simple CMS, and it is relatively standards-compliant. Adding new content doesn’t require much training and there are many plug-ins you can use to add CMS functionality to your site.
• Bad: With some work, you can turn WordPress into a CMS, but WordPress is not really a full-featured CMS. For example, WordPress won’t keep you from introducing bad code if you use Word to write your posts instead of WordPress. It also doesn’t do workflow management or track user roles.

Overall, creating a website with WordPress is straightforward, especially if you are happy with an existing template.  However, if you want to customize the look and functionality of the template, you’ll need to have robust web development skills, or hire a developer.

It’s important to keep in mind what WordPress does well, and what it does only with great effort, so you can have realistic expectations from the beginning. As long as you want your site to leverage WordPress’s strengths, such as blogging, posting frequent updates, and sorting by date or alphabetically, WordPress is a good way to go. But if you’re looking for a straight CMS, highly customized page layouts, but few of the blogging features of WordPress, you’d probably be better off going with a straight CMS solution, not WordPress.

For a look at a website that Scott Design created entirely in WordPress, visit the CTW website.

What would you add to this list?

Every day, business owners and advertisers hear about how they must keep up with the latest social media networks in order to have conversations with customers. There are now hundreds of options to consider, but with limited time, where is your time best spent? Whether building your company’s brand or your personal brand, the best place to start is with free online social media tools.

Getting online doesn’t have to take a lot of time and effort, as long as you narrow down your options to the sites that give you the best results for your time. I’d like to offer a brief introduction to six great free tools for engaging with your customers online. If you get yourself set up on these six social media sites, and devote an hour or so per week, you’ll have a great start on your social media marketing strategy.

1. LinkedIn is a business network with more than 70 million members in countries around the world. LinkedIn has four basic functions that you should use: Profile Pages, Company Pages, Answers, and Groups.

A Profile Page is your online business resumé, complete with your employment history, education, links to your website and blog, and more.

Your Company Page contains basic information about your company, plus a list of all your co-workers who have LinkedIn profiles.

LinkedIn Answers are questions posted by LinkedIn members on any subject. You can read or post answers to questions, or ask your own.

LinkedIn Groups are created by members and enable people with common interests to share their knowledge and questions through online discussions.

For detailed information about these four kinds of LinkedIn pages, see “Connecting with customers through LinkedIn.” For step-by-step instructions on setting up your account, see “Getting Started with LinkedIn.”

2. Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life, including friends, customers, and peers. Facebook started as a personal online tool but has evolved and is now used by individuals as well as businesses. Facebook has three kinds pages that you should use: Profiles, Groups, and Fan Pages.

A Profile Page contains information all about you, your work history, your education, your interests, and as much personal information as you’d like to include. You can add photos and videos to your profile, plus there is an ever-growing collection of applications you can add to your page to share even more about yourself. If you’re going to use Facebook for business, it’s best to keep the information on this page very professional. Information that you share on your Facebook “wall” is visible to the public and your Facebook “friends” and appears on their walls.

Facebook users can also create Facebook Groups to give others a place to start discussions, share information and events, and get answers to their questions.

Facebook Fan Pages are created by businesses, celebrities, or for products. You can post information about sales, new products or services, coupons, and more. And, your “fans” can comment back. All three types of Facebook pages are a great way to keep in close contact with your customers.

For detailed information about these three kinds of Facebook pages, see “Connecting with customers through Facebook.” For step-by-step instructions on setting up your account, see “Getting Started with Facebook.”

3. Twitter is an online service for posting quick answers to the simple question: What are you doing? Twitter is referred to as a “microblog” as it’s a blog with very short, 140-character postings. Twitter is a great way for businesses to share links, news, and events with customers and peers. You can subscribe to the Twitter postings of others by “following” them, and others can “follow” your postings, or tweets. When you go to twitter, you see a page filled with the tweets of all the people you follow.

Setting up your Twitter Profile is quick and easy. Your Profile contains simple information about you: your name, your location, a link to your website, a brief bio, information about the people you’re following on Twitter, and who’s following you. And, once you start tweeting, your profile contains all the tweets you’ve posted so far.

Use Twitter to announce new products and services, sales, share interesting articles you’re reading, link to interesting posts on your blog, and join in conversations with others on Twitter. Customers can share feedback on your products and services, ask questions, and share their own tips. It’s easy, since all you have to work with is 140 characters.

For detailed information about using Twitter for your business, see “Connecting with customers through Twitter.” For step-by-step instructions on setting up your account, see “Getting Started with Twitter.”

4. A Blog is a website, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, graphics, and/or video. Like Twitter, blogs are a great place to share information about you and your company, but in a longer format. You can post long or short posts, sharing company news, information about your industry or your clients’ industries, share your expertise, or write an article that might interest your customers.

One of the great things about blogs is that users can interact with you by posting comments in response to your blog articles. You can comment back, or contact them directly and engage them in conversations. And, people can subscribe to your blog and receive your articles via e-mail or through a blog reader.

Blogs also provide a way for you to create valuable content that is easily found by search engines. Your blog is indexed by Google and other search engines, and if you’ve written your copy with words that your customers might be looking for,  you’ll appear in search results pages near the top. It’s a great way for customers to find you.

5. Google Local Business Center is a way for you to help customers find you on Google. Through Google LBC you can create a business listing to be sure that local customers find you. If you have a business that serves local customers, you should create a listing using Google LBC.

Your Google listing is map-based, so when someone searches for your products and services and includes a location in the search (e.g., restaurants in Santa Cruz) Google will provide a listing of companies that provide that service with markers on a map.

You can provide basic company information, as well as coupons, photos, videos, and more. And, your customers can interact with your listing, providing reviews and comments. If you have reviews, your listing appears in search results with a rating and comments. It’s a great way for you to hear what your customers are thinking. If you have a customer that just had a great experience with your company, be sure to send them a link to your listing and ask them to give you a review.

Although Google is currently the largest search engine, you should consider listing your business on Yahoo! Local, Best of the Web Local, and Bing Local Listing Center. A really easy way to do this is through GetListed.org, which was launched in early 2009 as a resource for small business owners to list their businesses online.

6.  Yelp is an easy way to find, review, and talk about what’s great — and not so great — in your area. You can create a listing on Yelp that includes information about your company, and add in coupons, videos, photos, and more. Your customers can give you reviews, rating you on a set of criteria  you select. People looking for reviews can sort by rating or number of reviews and get results with reviews, marked on a map.

Make sure you ask happy customers to give you a review on Yelp after their service. And, read all reviews to see if there’s something you could be doing better for your customers.

Ready to get started?

It’s easy to get started with social media in just about a day:

• Sign up for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, a blog provider, Google Local Business Center, and Yelp
• Fill out the basic information (you can add more later)
• Join groups of peers and/or customers
• Listen and get a feel for discussion etiquette
• Get social by joining into conversations with your peers and customers.

And, with an hour or so per week, you can keep up with your customers and peers online.

I  did a recent presentation called “Free Online Tools to Create Conversations” that is now available as an online slideshow on SlideShare. The presentation introduces the six online tools outlined above, and includes screenshots of each type of page.

If you’re interested in more advanced use of social media marketing, take a look at “5 Steps in a Social Media Marketing Plan.”

And, if you’d like a video overview on creating an online marketing strategy, check out the Marketing Treasure Map on YouTube.

You know that you have some real treasures to offer your customers: your superb services, your excellent products, your unequaled solutions. But how do you make sure that someone looking for your treasure actually finds it?

You must make sure the route is clearly marked and that those wandering the oceans of information on the Internet actually land on your website and find their way to your buried treasure.

Here are the best ways to make sure no one gets lost on their way to find you:

1. Create mountains of valuable, compelling content on your site. These mountains should be visible from faraway search engines, as long as you’ve done a good job of search engine optimization, keyword use, and link building.

2. Lead customers to you by sending out messages through your blog, keep the Twitter fires burning, and broadcast your webinars and podcasts.

3. Reach out to customers through e-mails, direct mail, advertising, telemarketing, and events.

4. Create multiple places to land through optimized landing pages, LinkedIn profiles, Facebook pages, a blog, and search-engine-optimized pages throughout your site.

5. Clearly mark the path to the treasure using clear navigation and clean design.

6. Give the keys to customers through an online form, giving them access to the riches you offer.

Other Resources:

• Animated Marketing Treasure Map:

• PDF of the Marketing Treasure Map. Just be sure to give us credit if you use it elsewhere.

P.S. Check out “Getting started with Twitter,” “Getting Started with Facebook,” and “Getting started with LinkedIn” if you need help opening and personalizing your accounts.

Evolution happens when organisms adapt in order to survive successfully in new environments. These adaptations increase an organism’s ability to attract mates, avoid predators, and find food. Animals or plants that don’t adapt must either move out of the habitat or die out.

Adapt or perish

The business climate has gone through some rapid changes over the previous year and, just like animals, organizations must adapt to the new environment or face extinction. Just as organisms must attract mates, avoid predators, and find food, companies must build relationships with customers, beat the competition, and make sales.

Attracting Mates

No matter how assiduously a male bird chases a female, if he doesn’t have the feathers, he doesn’t get the mate. If he has traits that make him attractive to females of his species (color, size, behaviors), he’ll get all the attention he wants.

Similarly, pursuing your customers with letters, phone calls, generic e-mails, and sales calls, won’t get you any closer to building a relationship. Instead, you should attract your customers with online content that pulls them to you. Make sure your website is well-designed, optimized for online searches, and presents your company as you would like your customers to see you. Develop compelling content for your blog and e-newsletters that customers will want to forward to others. When they’re looking for the products or services you offer, you’ll be irresistible.

In the deep ocean where meals are rare and unpredictable, the deep sea anglerfish remains almost motionless and just waits for its prey to be drawn by its irresistible luminous lure. Your job is to create the content that will make your company just as irresistible.

Avoiding predators

Before the web, researching your competition was time-consuming, expensive, and often incomplete. Businesses needed to hire a research team, pay for expensive industry reports, and you still couldn’t get a full picture of your competitors.

You can now find out almost everything you need to know about your competitors on the web: Visit their websites, check out the online profiles of people who work for the companies, and read what their customers say about them online. Get to know all you can about their offers, prices, and services and make sure yours are more attractive and more effectively targeted to your desired audience.

You can also use what their customers say to adapt your offerings and capture new markets you hadn’t previously considered.

What you should not do is watch the wolves begin to circle without knowing what you’re up against.

Finding Food

Back in the day, standard sales tools, such as print advertising, direct mail, sales calls, and tradeshows were developed to get a company’s message across to a wide audience. All of these techniques come with high price tags and have little focus. They’re like a spider’s web that’s spread wide to catch whatever flies by. OK when there are swarms of bugs around, but not so good when they’re few and far between.

Today’s technologies provide ways for businesses to reach directly and cost-effectively tailor their messages directly to the audience. Send personalized e-mail newsletters to a well-honed list, to help you get your message to exactly the customers most likely to buy. Network online to get in touch with contacts around the world that you could never reach through a sales call. And, produce webinars and podcasts to speak to your customers directly without the costs of a tradeshow.

Natural Selection

Making some adaptations might not be easy, and there may be some who want to keep doing things the old way. But, often making a few big changes followed by a series of small mutations over time can evolve your company to a new level. Track the results that each of your adaptations gets. If the change doesn’t bring success, scrap it. And, if something is working, don’t change it.

The key to evolution is the willingness to adapt, survive, and flourish when the environment changes. And,  those that do survive and embrace these adaptations as a permanent part of their company’s framework will be poised to become the dominant species in the new business environment.

Marketing today involves the same principles of promoting your company and products to your potential customers. However, the number of ways you can promote your company has multiplied with the widespread adoption of Web 2.0 technologies.

The objectives of marketing include the following:
•    grow brand awareness
•    build a positive brand association
•    drive business development
•    broaden customer base
•    increase website visits and page views
•    convert leads into customers
•    create a connection between company and customers
•    manage crises
•    provide customer service
•    humanize your company
•    generate buzz

The particular marketing tactics you use to achieve these objectives can be put into two basic categories: outbound marketing and inbound marketing. (Some people refer to the two categories as Marketing 1.0 and Marketing 2.0.) Outbound marketing tactics include TV, radio, print, and yellow page ads; direct mail; telemarketing; e-mail blasts; and events and tradeshows. Inbound marketing tactics include online content creation (including blogs, videos, podcasts, presentations, eBooks, and news releases); social media marketing (such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, and StumbleUpon); and search engine optimization (including optimizing online content for search engines, getting quality links to your online content, and more).

So, why choose inbound marketing tactics over outbound marketing tactics?

Using the internet has become part of what people do every day. Unless you’re providing services to people with limited internet access, chances are you should start with inbound marketing tactics and supplement with outbound marketing tactics, if appropriate. Here are a few reasons why inbound marketing tactics might be a better choice today:

1. Buyers start the purchasing process by doing an online search. More and more people use the internet to locate your solutions, and then find out what other consumers, reviewers, and the media have to say about you before making any buying decisions. You need to make sure information about your company appears in search results when someone is looking for the services or solutions you provide. That means having plenty of online content, optimized for search engines, created by you and your customers.

2. Inbound marketing tactics can cost less per lead than outbound marketing tactics. With traditional marketing, there are cost outlays for design, placement, postage, telemarketing, e-mail blasts, and tradeshows. With inbound marketing, the only costs are time. If you have limited budgets, but you have someone with time to write blogs, participate in online media, or optimize your site, inbound marketing is for you. And, some of this investment of time can yield long-term results. Good site Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and interesting content can serve to lead visitors to your site for years to come.

3. Inbound marketing tactics are more respectful of your customer’s time. An ad during your favorite TV show, a phone call during dinner, a billboard on an otherwise lovely drive: all of these disruptive outbound marketing tactics intrude upon your customers’ lives. With inbound marketing, your customer decides whether or not to read your blog, watch your video, become a fan of your Facebook company page, follow you on Twitter, or click on your URL in a list of search results. If you’ve done your content creation, networking, and SEO work correctly, you will get found when someone’s looking for you.

4. Inbound Marketing tactics allow you to listen to your customers. Back in the day, if someone had a bad meal in your restaurant, they asked to speak to the manager. Now, they post a review online. The only chance you have to respond to someone’s criticism or comments is by participating. Make sure you set up a Google Alert on your company’s name and any important keywords in your industry and you can monitor what people are saying. When someone makes a comment, you should reply with an honest, open response. Don’t try to put a marketing “spin” on your answer, as that will tend to decrease your credibility. Customers today expect total transparency and direct, open communication with the companies they use.

5. Inbound marketing is more targeted. Because the audience for inbound marketing tactics is self-selecting, they tend to be more likely to be ready to purchase. Someone who searches for your solutions or services is more likely to want to buy them than someone you reach out to with outbound marketing. Similarly, someone who subscribes to your blog or belongs to the same online group probably has more use for your services than someone off the street.

The marketing tactics you decide to use depend on your audience, the service or products you provide, and your budget. But, be sure to plan on including inbound marketing tactics in your marketing strategy to take advantage of the benefits and the lower costs.

P.S. Check out “Getting started with Twitter,” “Getting Started with Facebook,” and “Getting started with LinkedIn” if you need help opening and personalizing your accounts.

Part 2 in the Getting Started with Social Media series

If you want to create an online presence for yourself in a community of business professionals, LinkedIn is a great place to start. Setting up a LinkedIn profile takes just minutes and is a great way to connect with other people with similar business interests.

LinkedIn is a social networking site mainly for business professionals. As of December 2008, there were more than 30 million registered users on LinkedIn.

Here’s all you need to do to use LinkedIn:

1. Open a free LinkedIn Account. First, go to linkedin.com and click on “Join today” Enter your name, e-mail, password, country, postal code, and current job information (if any), and click “Join LinkedIn.”

2. Complete your profile. Think of your profile as your online resumé. You should add a photo, information about your previous jobs, your education, and any information you’d like to share about your expertise, your interests, your contact information, and more. There are fields for each of these on the Edit Profile screen. Just complete as much as you want. The more you fill in, the more likely you are to make connections with people.

You’re done! You can stop here if you want to. Just add new information to your LinkedIn profile as it changes.

Getting social with LinkedIn

Now, if you want to get more “social” with LinkedIn, you can add connections, join groups, get recommendations, and participate in LinkedIn discussions.

Here are the easiest ways to connect with your colleagues:

1. Add connections. You can import your e-mail addresses into LinkedIn and then decide which of your friends and colleagues you would like to invite to connect with you. You can also invite them one by one in the Contacts->Invite Contacts section of your page. Make sure the connections you make on LinkedIn are quality connections, those with whom you have a professional relationship.

2. Join groups. LinkedIn Groups are communities who share a common experience, passion, interest, affiliation or goal. Click on Groups-> Find a group to search for groups that interest you. You might want to start with your high school or college, any professional organizations you belong to, or just search for terms that interest you. It’s easy to remove groups you don’t want to belong to anymore.

3. Get recommended. LinkedIn users with recommendations are three times as likely to get inquiries through LinkedIn searches. Ask your colleagues to recommend you through LinkedIn. It only takes a minute and it makes a big difference to viewers of your profile.

4. Participate in online discussions. You can choose to see updates from your network and all the groups you belong to on your LinkedIn home page and/or via e-mail. Read the questions and comments people are posting and see if you can add to the conversation. When you feel comfortable, post your own questions or interesting articles for discussion. It’s a great way to connect with members of your business community worldwide.

5. Add applications. LinkedIn has a whole suite of applications you can use to add more to your profile. Display the most recent posts on your blog, include your Twitter updates, add a slide show, share travel plans, and more. It’s a great way to flesh out your profile to really give people an idea of who you are.

Your LinkedIn profile, when complete, becomes a great online repository of information about you, your career, and your business interests. It can help you connect with others in your field, get that great new job you’re looking for, and help people find you online.

Learning new technologies is not always as easy for some people as others. The technology adoption lifecycle, developed at Iowa State, was created to show the range of responses to new technologies. This same model can be applied to the adoption of social media technologies.

On the right we have the innovators and enthusiasts who invented the social media programs we use today (LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, Twitter, etc.). They’re already at work on the next great idea. Close behind are the early adopters who embrace new technologies easily. In the middle are the pragmatists and conservatives who wait for new technology to be proven useful. And, on the left, we have the skeptics who are the last to adopt any of these here newfangled ideas.

Recently, several of my clients have asked me about how to use social media for themselves. They are savvy computer, internet, and e-mail users, have personal and/or company websites, know how to get their digital photos onto their computers, but haven’t taken that first step in getting involved in social media. On our chart, they are the skeptics, but they are ready to become social media users.

If you are one of these “laggards” (Iowa State’s term, not mine!), this series of articles is for you. I’m going to try to show how easy it is to get involved with the biggies today: Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

P.S. Check out “Real things you can do with Twitter” for a list of ways to have fun and do work on Twitter.

Well, American voters stated loud and clear yesterday that they wanted change. Most likely, that desire for change was a call for changes in economic policies – in just about every election, the incumbent party loses if economic indicators are down – but I’m sure a lot of voters were looking for changes in foreign policy, military, and social policies as well.

Change is something that all of us should consider for our organizations. With uncertain economic conditions ahead, it’s a good time for companies to evaluate their own strategies and policies and see if a change is in order in order to succeed, or even survive, hard times. Here are some questions that may generate discussion about whether you need to change:

Do you need to evolve the way you engage with customers?

• Do you allow two-way communication with your customer?
• Can customers easily ask you questions and post their thoughts about your solutions?
• Do you allow customers to communicate with each other?
• Are your customers receiving targeted, useful information from you?
• Do you get regular feedback from sales and channel reps about customer concerns?

Changes you can make now:

• Add Web 2.0 technologies (blogs, Wikis, RSS feeds, videos, etc.) to your websites so different types of online visitors can interact with you
• Create an online forum where customers can interact with your company, and each other.
• Evaluate how potential customers hear about your webinars, demos, and white papers. Make the lead generation path from awareness to registration clear and simple.
• Segment your e-mail lists by collecting reader preferences to ensure that customers receive targeted, useful information from you.
• Set up company pages on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and other appropriate social networking sites.

Do you need to change the way you position your company?

• Have your products and solutions evolved?
• Has your target audience changed?
• Is your brand still fresh, modern, and on target?

Changes you can make now:

• Set up your website so you can update it easily and often.
• Organize your site to allow visitors to quickly and easily find the information that they need.
• Update your positioning to reflect product, solution, and target audience changes.
• Incorporate feedback from sales reps, your channel, and customers.

If everything is working right now, and you have as much business as you can handle, you might need to make only minor adjustments to your marketing to grow your company. But, during the current economic challenges, changes in your marketing may be essential to not only growth, but survival.

As more and more people join online communities, the questions increasingly come up: I’m here … now what? Keeping in contact with colleagues and friends is a great use for social media, but how can companies create a social media strategy to take advantage of online communities?

Staking out your place online with a LinkedIn page is a great way to start, but to truly get the most out of a social media strategy, you should create content, keep up conversations, and get your whole company involved. Doing so will help customers learn about your company’s solutions and let you learn more about your customers.

Number 1: Help people find you and your company.
LinkedIn profiles receive a high page rank in Google search results, so you should make sure you have a LinkedIn page for yourself and a LinkedIn page for your company. Complete all the information in your profile, including your website, blog, and other online communities, and set your public profile to “Full View.” Make sure all the employees in your company also have LinkedIn profiles. They should complete all the information in their profiles and make them public, and make sure they link to your company website and LinkedIn Company page. Once you have completed your LinkedIn pages, you may want to consider creating pages on Facebook and MySpace to increase your online visibility. Whatever you do, be sure to Google your name and company name and make sure the information you find is correct, relevant, and presents you the way you wish to be seen.

Number 2: Promote yourself.
Include enough information about yourself and your company online so people know what you do and that you do it well. Once your online information is complete, invite others to be in your network. If you create a Facebook Company page, invite contacts to become fans of your page so they are notified when you update your page. Keep your Facebook company page updated, adding news and recent work on the Wall. Update your profile on your LinkedIn page and e-mail your network about recent company successes to help to keep your company in the public’s eye. Include information in the “Honors and Awards” section, and include a message about current news in your “What are you working on?” section.

Number 3: Start a conversation.
Open up a dialogue between yourself and your peers, or yourself and your customers, by starting your own blog. On your blog, you can create a survey, ask for new product ideas, and create a forum for feedback from customers. Write about subjects your customers are interested in, including tips and information to help customers in their lives and businesses. If you’re not ready to create your own blog, comment on other blogs related to your industry when you have something to add, and always be sure to sign with your name and URL. A quick way to get started with blogging without a big investment in time and technology is microblogging on a network such as Twitter, where you can send out quick updates on what you’re working on, recent successes, and other news.

Number 4: Join the group.
Look on LinkedIn Groups, Google Groups, or Yahoo Groups for groups that are related to the product or service you offer. Be sure to pick your social communities wisely or you’ll be wasting your time … and theirs. And, once in the group, participate to share your knowledge and expertise with your potential customers. If you don’t find a group, start your own. Decide wether you have the time to contribute enough content to get the group started, and then keep involved to make sure your group members are building their community.

Number 5: Share your expertise.
You and your employees should join in on discussions, Q&A forums, wikis, and blogs when you have valuable information to share with your online communities. If you want to say something that’s difficult to communicate through words only, consider posting a “how-to” or demonstration video on YouTube. Giving away your knowledge can build your reputation as a respected authority.  Don’t be afraid to disagree with the crowd—having strong evidence to support a contradictory position can start great new discussions. Be fair and honest and you’ll become trusted advisors to those in your network.

Number 6: Be consistent and comprehensive.
Make sure your content appears consistently across all the media your company uses to communicate. Don’t count on people getting information from only one source; use your corporate website, social networking sites, advertising, eNewsletters, white papers, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing, new media advertising, microblogging, and other Web 2.0 technologies to spread a consistent message.

Number 7: Create your own online community.
The best way to hear from your customers is to give them a way to speak directly to you. You can create your own customer community, branded with your identity. In order for your community to work, you need a lot of members, so this strategy may not work for companies with a smaller audience. (Think: party in a big ballroom where only 10 people show up.) But, having your own customer community can lower your costs to market and sell your products and services, and create an increase in your brand loyalty, as participants interact with one another and your company. Don’t be afraid of negative comments—unless you choose to ignore them. Be sure you listen to what your customers say, respond to their concerns, and incorporate their feedback into future endeavors.

As you increase your company’s involvement in online communities, through robust social network content and participation in online communities, you will build your company’s visibility in your industry and bring your company and your customers closer. Keeping yourself and your company active online will forge lasting relationships that will help solidify your reputation and build your business.

P.S. Check out “Getting started with Twitter,” “Getting Started with Facebook,” and “Getting started with LinkedIn” if you need help opening and personalizing your accounts.