I went to Carolina Connect 2011 and got to see a good keynote by Peter Shankman. I turned on the Flip camera for the last few minutes of Q&A and got some insights from Peter about the complementary nature of SEO and social media. His point was that SEO helps the searcher find you but social media, in the form of reviews and recommendations, is what ultimately will persuade prospects to engage with your brand, or buy what you’re selling.

Of course, that is correct, and in a way nothing new. “Social proof” in the form of referrals, word-of-mouth, and customer testimonials has existed since people started selling stuff. Good marketers and salespeople began using social proof long before there was an Internet. As Peter put it creating customers who will spread the word “goes back to customer service” in the broadest sense of the term.

Shankman’s talk was definitely the highlight of the event.

P.S. We are long-time fans of HARO (see below) and regularly submit pitches for articles. Just last week we got a call from Inc. magazine to confirm a quote from us. Next issue?

More about Peter Shankman from the event website:

Peter Shankman is perhaps best known for Help A Reporter Out (HARO), one of the fastest-growing social media services in North America, which he founded in 2008. Every day, HARO brings nearly 30,000 reporters and bloggers and more than 100,000 news sources together with thousands of small businesses to tell their stories, promote their brands and sell their products and services.

Shankman is the author of Can We Do That?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work – and Why Your Company Needs Them (Wiley and Sons 2006). His second book, Customer Service: New Rules for a Social-Enabled World (Que Biz-Tech 2010), comes out later this year, revealing how to make the most of social and viral media in customer service.

1. TubeReplay

This site features a super-simple premise. TubeReplay will play a YouTube video over and over again, until you stop it or go mad — whichever happens first. Just enter the URL of the clip you want repeated and the site will do the rest.

2. DragonTape

DragonTape allows you to remix YouTube videos into a seamless mixtape. Search for the clips you want, drag and drop to set up the play order and then share the playlist with friends via an auto-generated URL, or embed it with the code provided.

See all 12 Hacks at Mashable.

1. Design for Both “Like” and “Share”

Rather than choose one or the other, sites that combine “Like” and “Share” into the user experience see the greatest level of success in terms of driving referral traffic, building relationships and learning more about their customers and visitors. Why? Not only do “Like” and “Share” have different strengths and different applications, they actually drive the most value when used in concert. Let’s drill into the specifics to illustrate.

Read the whole post at Mashable.

Your Basic Blog

Frank Reed, owner of FT Internet Marketing, who blogs at Frank Thinking about Internet Marketing, says your blog should be part of your website, which will boost the search engine optimization of your site. “It becomes a body of work that tells your story better than your resume,” he says.

The idea of writing makes lots of small business owners break out in hives, but you don’t have to be Shakespeare. A great blogging strategy is to simply post a link to other content with a paragraph about why you think it’s important, Reed says. Don’t be afraid you’re driving people away from your own site. “People who share information get the most benefit,” he says. “You become an information broker.”

Read the full post at American Express Business.

In this short video I show you how to add another person as an “admin” on Facebook page. Because you can use some help keeping that thing updated! And speaking of “help,” Facebook’s help area is actually pretty good and you can instructions for most anything you want to do, but I thought this video would save you some time.

Most small businesses, at least the ones we work with, are now using Facebook on some level to connect with their customers. The only way to stay top-of-mind though is if your business page is active. By adding an “admin” more people will be able to post updates. If you have a blog or Twitter those updates can also be added, automatically, to your Facebook page’s news feed. We’ll do another “how-to” on those.

Another reason to add an admin: Let’s say your working with someone from our marketing agency. We use some  data gathering and reporting tools that can integrate Facebook statistics. Once we have admin access to your page we can connect that to our system, and pull in the data regarding the number of new “fans,” interactions, etc.

As always, let us know if you have any questions.

Study #1

Nearly 40% of Consumers “Like” Companies on Facebook to Publicly Display Their Brand Affiliation to Friends.

As Facebook grows, we’re able to learn even more about behaviors and preferences of its users. As Facebook continues to change, new stats surface to give up an even better idea of how consumers on Facebook to prefer to interact with brands and companies. A new report released by ExactTarget and CoTweet found that discounts and “social badging” were the primary reasons consumers Like brands on Facebook.

Nearly 40% of Facebook users who become fans do so to receive discounts and promotions and 39% become fans to show their support for a brand to their friends. Just as interesting is how these stats compare to Twitter and email marketing. Only 23% of respondents said they follow brands on Twitter and about 10% say they subscribe to email notification for the same reasons.

Read the full article at Social Media Examiner.

For the study, Virtue analyzed Facebook post data from August 10, 2007 to October 10, 2010 from more than 1,500 brand streams — more than 1.64 million posts and 7.56 million comments in all. Shares and “likes” were not included in the study.

Here are some of the big takeaways:

• The three biggest usage spikes tend to occur on weekdays at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. ET.
• The biggest spike occurs at 3:00 p.m. ET on weekdays.
• Weekday usage is pretty steady, however Wednesday at 3:00 pm ET is consistently the busiest period.
• Fans are less active on Sunday compared to all other days of the week.

Read the whole store at Mashable.

Here are the results.

1. Facebook is biased against newcomers. As a newcomer, Facebook rarely features activity in friends news feeds.
2. Facebook has a Catch 22. To get noticed you have to get friends to interact with your posts.
3. “Top-News”: Facebook decides what posts it thinks will be most important to you and features them in the highly selective “Top News” section while ignoring other posts from friends.
4. “Most Recent” News is censored too. There is a little known setting that caps the number of friends in your feed. You can change this in your news feed settings.
5. “Stalking” your friends doesn’t help to get you noticed or in their news feed more often.
6. Having friends who “stalk” you will help to get you noticed more.
7. Links are better than status updates.
8. Photos and videos are better than links.
9. Comments on your post will help get you noticed.
10. Your post will appear more often in the news feeds of friends with smaller networks.

Read the full article at The Daily Beast.