A recent study by Marketing Sherpa concluded that simply including sharing buttons to an e-mail marketing campaign led to a “25% boost in reader interaction, and a surge in inbound traffic from social networking sites.” Moreover, huge gains were reported in traffic via social sites: 2,070% from LinkedIn (LinkedIn), 1,680% from Twitter (Twitter), and 1,351% from Facebook (Facebook).

How to Do It

Share buttons have become common on Web content, but they’re also easy to integrate into e-mails. If your e-mail consists of multiple articles, make sure each points to a page on the Web, and that your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn share buttons are setup to share the URL of each respective article (note: you’ll want to stick to images and text links for your e-mail share buttons as opposed to JavaScript).

Beyond sharing articles though, make sure all of your e-mails include prominent links to your presence on various social sites. Calls to action in a sidebar or in the header like “Follow Us on Twitter” or “Become a Fan on Facebook” will help people connect with you on social sites and help build your audience on them.

Growth Strategies

Once you’ve integrated social media into your e-mails, be sure you’re cross promoting. There’s no harm in reminding your Twitter followers, Facebook fans, or LinkedIn contacts that you have an e-mail newsletter. And once they signup, they’re the ones most likely to share content with their own networks on social sites.

Beyond that, create compelling content that people want to share. While a good promotion might not be as viral as a funny YouTube (YouTube) clip, your business’ fans will be more likely to spread the word if there’s a specific call to action. Moreover, create content that’s not necessarily a direct sell, but provides value to potential customers in the form of information that’s useful to them. Between good content and easy social media sharing options, your e-mail marketing can become a powerful weapon in growing your business.

Social media activities run the gamut from Blogging, micro blogging sites such as Twitter, social networking communities such as LinkedIn and Facebook, video and music uploading sites, discussion forums, photo sharing and more. With so many different sites and ways to participate, it can be difficult to keep track of all your efforts.

Participating in social media doesn’t take a lot of money, but it is very time consuming and businesses want to know that all of this investment in time is paying off. Before launching a campaign, you should have a firm grasp on what it is you’re trying to accomplish. Is it increasing website traffic? Getting more ezine subscribers? Having more people download your free ebook or whitepaper? Or maybe you just want to work on your company’s brand image. Whatever it is, you need to have a plan. As the old saying goes, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there”. Have your game plan intact before getting started in marketing yourself, or your company with social media.

There are many different forms of social media, so it’s impossible to use them all. Pick three or four, and funnel the majority of your efforts there. Even if you won’t be working them all, at the very least you should claim your name or company name on as many social services as possible. You don’t want to find out later that someone has the user name that you want. If you need to see if your chosen user name is available try Namechk.com which checks dozens of social media networking and bookmarking sites all at once to see if it’s available. Claim your name now so you won’t end up being sorry later.

How do you monitor all the buzz?

How do you monitor your brand and protect your hard earned reputation? I thought you’d never ask. There isn’t one fool-proof method but there are many services and tools out there that will make it easy to see who’s talking about you online. Some are free and others will make you pull out your wallet.

These “online reputation management” tools, as they’re often referred to, will help you to define keywords, or phrases you wish to track and then watches for any mention of your company name, products, or services. It’s important to defend and monitor your online reputation.

Let’s take a look at some of the measuring and tracking tools at your disposal:

1. http://BackTweets.com
   A search engine for Twitter. See who’s tweeting your links and more. Can also sign up for email alerts of new findings.
2. http://Addictomatic.com **
   A little different than the others , you type in a keyword, topic or phrase and out it goes searching the top blogs, news sites, Google, Technorati, Ask, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Topix and more. You’ll be given a personalized results page to bookmark with everything it finds related to your topic.
3. http://Surchur.com
   Search for the latest and greatest on topics that are popular right now. Type in a keyphrase and it searches blogs, social news sites, photo and video sites for your chosen topic.
4. http://AlertRank.com
   A better way to organize and sort Google alerts. Get a daily report emailed to you in a spreadsheet format of what it finds.
5. http://www.google.com/alerts **
   I’ve been using this “secret weapon” for years. Simply type in your name or company name and receive daily emails of results found. They do the work, you receive the links. Free and nice.
6. http://BrandsEye.com
   An online reputation management tool with a real-time, concise overview of your online reputation. Multiple levels of services and pricing available. Starting at $1.00.
7. http://Twazzup.com
   Another Twitter only search engine.
8. http://SocialMention.com/alerts
   Just like Google Alerts but for social media. Enter your keyword phrase and email address to be notified of any new findings. Searches blogs, microblogs like Twitter, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, videos and more.
9. http://BlogPulse.com
   A search engine that searches only for data posted to blogs. Enter your keyword, hit submit and off it goes to gather results.
10. http://Topsy.com
    Topsy will track your tweets that have been retweeted so you can find out who’s been sending you all that “link love”. Type in your Twitter user name and you’ll be amazed at what you find.

If you’d like to track incoming traffic from your various social media profiles, an easy way to do it using Google Analytics can be found here http://Tinyurl.com/kuc9rL **.

Just as there are many ways to market your company using social media, as you can see, there’s a multitude of tools and services at your disposal to track and see if all of that hard work is paying off. Smart companies realize the importance of social media in their marketing efforts and are utilizing it on some level. How smart are you?

Google rolled out real-time search technology last month, to offer searchers access to brand-new blog posts and news items far faster than the five to 15 minutes it previously took Google’s Web crawlers to discover newly created items.

Bing, Cuil, and other search engines also provide various kinds of real-time results. Both Google and Bing have also forged major deals with Twitter to get real-time access to tweets, those 140-character microblog posts sent out by Twitter members. But Google claims to offer the most comprehensive real-time results by scanning news headlines, blogs, and feeds from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other sources.

The tweets are a mainstay of Google’s real-time results, but Google has not previously discussed how it ranks them. A fundamental Google strategy for identifying tweet relevance is analogous to that used by Google’s PageRank technology, which helps find relevant Web pages with traditional Web search. Under PageRank, Google judges the importance of pages containing a given search keyword in part by looking at the pages’ link structure. The more pages that link to a page–and the more pages linking to the linkers–the more relevant the original page.

In the case of tweets, the key is to identify “reputed followers,” says Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, who led development of real-time search. (Twitterers “follow” the comments of other Twitterers they’ve selected, and are themselves “followed.”)

“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely, Singhal says. It is “definitely, definitely” more than a popularity contest, he adds.

“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”

But Google’s social-ranking tricks are hardly the only method the search giant uses to extract relevance from tweets. Google also developed new ways to choose which (if any) tweets to surface for common terms like “Obama”–and to avoid spam or low-quality tweets–all within seconds.

Source : Technology Review

What seems like three totally random and independent topics just joined forces in a new mobile platform called Waze. The app is free on all the major mobile platforms, including Android, and it brings a full fledged social gaming element to your mobile phone’s turn by turn navigation.

Waze uses an advanced algorithm to provide its community with driver generated GPS and turn by turn navigation. What that means in simple terms is that instead of waiting for the maps to update with the newest changes and developments on the road, the Waze users do it both actively and passively by just having the app open.

Waze launched a new version of their iPhone app that adds a gaming element, which encourages its users to help update the maps, thereby helping other members of the community on their journey. Basically, in addition to the advanced GPS technology, and in addition to the user generated maps, Waze now incorporates a contest in which your vehicle is represented by a Pac Man like figure and as you drive, you eat prizes along the way, thereby collecting points and competing against other users.

If you drive on a new road that has not been updated on the Waze map, and collect the “goodies” along the way, you receive even more points than a regular road, and rank higher on the global scoreboard. By competing in the contest, you enjoy an entertaining gaming experience, but more importantly, you contribute to the Waze community by helping to build the map, which is then used by other Wazers.

What Waze has really done here with this new version of their already popular iPhone app is combined three of the hottest spaces online, social, gaming, and mobile GPS, into one fun and intuitive interface.

Introduction

• Home page
• Search
• “Audi A1″ introduction

Prospect

• Advanced searches

Tools

• CoTweet for a “CRM” approach (disclosure: advisor)
• Objective Marketer for tweeting (disclosure: advisor)
• One Forty Twitter app store (disclosure: advisor)
• SocialToo for auto-following and spam killing.
• Tweetdeck for Mac or PC
• Tweetie for iPhone
• Tweetmeme to build traffic (disclosure: advisor)

Best Practices

• Always be linking—“inform.”
• Always be responding.
• Always be getting retweeted.

Dogmas to Ignore

• You should “me-form.” You can but only if you’re Lance Armstrong.
• You should not repeat tweets. You shouldn’t if they’re boring, and you have only 100 followers. You can if they’re not, and you have thousands of followers.
• You should not automate tweeting with feeds. You shouldn’t if you don’t want to have a life, but you can if you do.
• You should not use ghosts. You don’t need ghosts if you’re omniscient, but more smart people looking for good links is always better.
• You should make everyone happy. If you’re not pissing someone off on Twitter, you’re not using it right.

Please note, this article is repurposed from Guy Kawasaki's own blog, originally posted here.

Include a Twitter icon or a “Follow us here” or “Hey, we’re on Twitter” type of badge on your site. Don’t make us scroll down to your footer links- give us something at the top of the page. Additionally, make sure it’s CLEAR that you’re on Twitter. Saying community, in my mind, sounds like a forum or entire social network in and of itself.

2. Talk to us!

Now, responding to followers doesn’t have to be an obligatory, “every time someone tweets our name, we have to tweet back at them” type of thing. However, if you’re tweeting ONLY as a one-sided marketing tool, you’re missing the point. If someone asks a valid question, acknowledge it. Even if you don’t have an answer, we like to know you’re listening (and really, we do appreciate it).

3. Keep us in the know!

We’re going down for updates in a couple minutes – sorry for the inconvenience, but we’ll be back up within the hour.

It tells us the service that is going down is keeping us in the loop. They want to make the service better, of course, and though it’s an inconvenience at the time, they give a warning that it’s happening or they advise their us that there’s nothing catastrophically wrong.

Now of course there are times when we want a solution. However, if there is some information that would better help us understand what’s going on, you’re making a great start.

4. Don’t spam us!

Seriously, do I even have to say this? This includes mass @ messages (consisting of only usernames with no message) and tweeting the same message to different people over and over, among a multitude of others.

5. Be human and be honest!

Let us know who’s we’re talking to, whether it’s a team or an individual. It’s really simple. We understand the difference between a company that says it cares and a company that actually does.

I want to be clear – these are the absolute bare-necessity basics and I’m only scratching the surface. But they are a few things that I’ve come to expect from my favorite brands and businesses on Twitter.

What do you expect from businesses on Twitter?

This year will see a tidal wave of e-readers arrive, and as soon as they arrive they’ll be instantly commodified. Here’s a look at how the battle lines are now shaping up in the display and hardware corners of the e-book market.

The emerging e-book market is in a full-blown melee—a free-for-all where everyone along the chain from content producer to reader is trying to be the first to figure it all out. Over the next few days, we’ll talk about how the battle lines are shaping up in the following areas: displays, chips, storefronts, and publishers. Many of the combatants are involved in more than one of these areas—Qualcomm is in displays and chips; newcomer Copia is pushing hardware and a storefront; Sprint, Hearst, Skiff, and LG are all allied across displays, storefronts, and publishers under the Skiff banner; and so on.

the Skiff vs. the QUE

Most of the e-readers coming out in the next few months are based on E-Ink, but that doesn’t mean that the displays will be identical. Reading devices will compete with each other on size, thickness, resolution, contrast, and price. The screens will also compete to offer color as quickly as possible.

The Skiff has the edge on size so far with an 11.5″ diagonal screen. Plastic Logic comes in a close second. Both are easily large enough to view a full A4 page without doing any scaling, and both have solid industrial design.

Both the Skiff and the Plastic Logic QUE are incredibly thin. This thinness is made possible in part by the fact that both have flexible display substrates—Skiff’s uses a foil substrate developed by LG, while Plastic Logic’s uses a plastic substrate developed in-house. Both of these make for flexible displays, but of the two only the Skiff itself is physically flexible.

On the resolution front, the Skiff wins at 174dpi to Plastic Logic’s slightly lower 150dpi.

The Adidas Originals application uses Facebook Connect to personalize the application experience, even granting you power over the Death Star control deck so you can blow up your Facebook (Facebook) friends’ streets with help from Google Maps (Google Maps).

The application experience is straight out of a Star Wars movie, and on the first go around you’ll notice that your location is the first target of the superlaser. After your street is blown to smithereens, however, you can target a friend’s location by selecting any one of your Facebook friends to attack. This is where the Google Maps integration comes into play.

Dorothy Miller has hopped on the Twitter bandwagon, but the 80-year-old grandmother doesn’t use a computer or mobile device to update her status. Nope, Dorothy tweets away with the help of a fax machine and a New York-based service called Celery.

Celery allows users, many of them computer-phobic senior citizens, to submit tweets, blog entries, Facebook updates or emails via fax machine and then posts the content online for more tech-savvy friends and family to see.

Dorothy loves the service, commenting to a local news station: “I don’t usually write to my daughter that much because she talks too much. And that takes up too much of my time, but she can read my twitterings here and she can see what her mother’s doing and know that her mother’s okay.”

At this time of writing it’s been online for 2 weeks, had around 35,000 views, 350 favs and 240 embeds.