This is different to websites that simply transmit news.

The content can then be passed around in much the same way as viral marketing whereby you allow others to help promote your business.

Social Media is a new way to market business products & services online.  It should be used alongside traditional offline marketing and other online marketing such as a company website.

There are plenty of social media tools to use, all of which will help to promote your business but there are certain things to consider.  The main points being:

• Spend time building up your followers/ readers

• Do not try to oversell your company

• •    Be seen to be giving useful content for free

More so with social media than other ways of marketing, you need to ‘get involved’ with the medium and devote time interacting and regularly updating social media accounts to make them work for you.

Blogging needs regular interesting posts that will engage a target audience.  I recommend a minimum of one post per week & not more than one per day, unless the information is time critical.

There are many of social media tools to use but never start using a new one.  Always wait to see how popular a tool is & gauge whether it is right for you & engages your target audience.

If you are aiming at a school leaver / young adult market I would recommend you set up Facebook & Twitter accounts and, if you have interesting video content or the budget to produce it, a YouTube channel too.

As for blogging, you can setup a company blog, sometimes known as a ‘corporate blog‘ but it would also be beneficial to consider publishing articles on other popular blogs that have a young readership; and to consider not only banner advertising but articles of interest written in such a way to include links back to your website or blog rather than wanting other blogs to simply write about your products & services.

For example, to attract football fans during last summer’s World Cup in South Africa, Domino Pizza created free football related games & added them to a Facebook page.  They then asked Buzzin Media to write & publish a football related articles including relevant backlinks to their website & their football game on Facebook.  See buzzinfootball.co.uk.

By doing so, blog readers were more inclined to click on the links within a football post rather than click on a peripheral banner advertisement.

The main thing to consider is that all social media requires ongoing management.  This is a service Buzzin Media can offer you or advice you on.

Buzzin Media is a UK based blog network with currently 33 popular blog titles covering business, entertainment & sport.  For a more information and a complete list of current blog titles in the Buzzin Media blog network, visit www.buzzinmedia.co.uk.

WordPress 2.7 will see some big changes that you are going to have to get used to, especially with the admin and backend.

As with all software changes there will possibly be a part of you that wishes they would stop developing the software programs you are familiar and confident with; while another part of you is considering how much better the last major update was, once you eased yourself back into your comfort zone.

As with the last major WordPress update, 2.5, the majority of the changes are going to affect the admin and not make any major visual changes to your readers.  But this version will not just be updating the admin but very much rebuilding the backend development.

Aaron Brazell has written a great post – 10 things you need to know about WordPress 2.7 and is something I strongly recommend you read if it is going to affect you.

In general, it’s a little disappointing when you get a “null pointer” from a private company, but it’s particularly annoying from a university. University mistakes like “technology transfer programmes” (that stop software becoming free software available to social enterprises) are justified by a need to get more money – but clearly this particular university has money to waste. How about others?

If there was a way to subscribe to email or blog news of their research publications, I probably would have subscribed. Instead, I’ve just ranted here (without rewarding them with a link) and now I’m going to recycle the flier. I’ll probably have forgotten the three-letter acronym by next week. It’s simply bad marketing. It’s paper spam. Please, if you are putting things into conference handout packs, ask yourself why? What are you hoping to get out of it? How are you going to measure its success?

1. JavaScript or other crawler-unfriendly navigation that may impede indexing

This one is best avoided at design-time, by including Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Level A in the design brief, but if you’ve ended up with JavaScript-based navigation on your site (check by doing “View Source” and searching for the code for your home page link and so on – if you can find it, then it’s probably not javascript) and it’s based on some template system, a webmaster can probably do a whole-site edit to put the navigation links in the page properly – or at least add a useful <noscript> tag.

2. Navigation that buries important pages within the site architecture.

The structure of the website’s files and the structure of the link menus do not need to match, so if there’s a page that you feel is important, get your webmaster to add it to the navigation links across the whole site.

3. Duplicate “pages” getting indexed under multiple URLs.

This usually happens for one of two reasons: one is inappropriately-parked domains, which is mistake 6 below and often fairly easy to fix; the other is a misbehaving web application, which you’ll need to get a programmer to fix.

You can do a simple test of your web application by starting at your homepage and following links to a particular page; then open a new browser window and try to reach the same page by different links (or a site search) and compare the address bars (the bit of your browser showing http://) – do they match? If not, you’ve got this problem.

4. No keyword phrase focus in the content or conversely, keyword phrase stuffing

You can use a good word-counter on the text to see how common different keywords and keyphrases, or use the “webmaster tools” section of some search engines to see what they’re focusing on.

Keyword-stuffing can be fairly easy to see. If you “View Source” on a page and there’s a large block of keyword-intensive text somewhere in it that doesn’t appear it when viewed in a browser, then it’s probably stuffing. Many sites regard stuffing as a sort of spam, so you don’t want to be found doing this.

To fix these problems, rewrite the page text appropriately.

5. An optimized home page, but that’s it

Repeat your checks from problem 4 on a few pages other than the home page to discover whether you suffer from this. Also, see whether your website statistics show search engine visitors arriving at a variety of different pages (these are sometimes called “Entry Page” statistics).

6. Additional domains owned by the company are not properly redirected

If you usually use .co.uk, but you also have a .com domain, try visiting a random page on your website, then click in the address bar and replace the .co.uk with .com – what happens?

If the page is Not Found, then your domains aren’t properly redirected and you need a Redirect adding to the second one.

If the page displays but the address doesn’t change itself back, then your domains are probably pointing at the same webspace but aren’t properly redirected, which will mean you’re probably making mistake 3 above. Usually, the simplest way to fix this is with a conditional redirect. On Apache webservers, you can add a .htaccess file containing something like:-

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.co\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/$1 [R=permanent,L]

That even works on BT Business web hosting, by the way. If it doesn’t work, try asking your web hosting provider to enable mod_rewrite for you or ask them to suggest how to achieve the same result.

The above list of mistakes was published on Search Engine Land last week. The correction methods are all things used by my webmaster cooperative.

There are plenty of reasons why your business should have a corporate blog as well as a website.

The most important point, in these days where companies are aware they are fighting their compeitors to be ranked highest on Google and receive the best Google Page Ranking, is that because of the way blogs are created they work very well with the search engines.

For optimum results, I always recommend that companies create an external blog, as this allows them to promote the blog separately from their main website.

By creating an external blog you can:

Promote your business on your blog & your website
Have two windows to show your products & services
Target different customers
Create a larger footprint in the search engines
Submit your blog to blog directories

Blogs are created with optimised site architecture in mind, and by using Wordpress to develop and manage your blog you can add extra SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to your blog using one of many available Wordpress plug-ins.

Blogs are set up to include an accessible & simple navigation and every page is set up to link back to the main pages.

Furthermore, by using a ‘blogroll’, they have the potential to create reciprocal links with other blogs.

Search engines like Google can show your blog posts (published articles) within minutes.  That can be very useful if your products & services are time sensitive.

We have had many posts on the first page of Google within 10 minutes of publishing them.

As well as submitting your external blog to all the major search engines, if you create an external blog you will be able to submit it to blog dorectories such as Technorati and Blog Catalog.  These are directories specifically for blogs.

There are plenty of UK businesses that are still not using blogs to successful promote their business.  If you are not getting leads from your blog then I recommend you start before your competitors gain the advantage.

If you would like to know more about business blogging or corporate blog management services, please contact me on terry@BuzzinFly.co.uk

• Make your company blog relevant and useful so it will rank in search engines
• Make use of relevant and popular keywords when adding content to your blog
• Keep the distinction between the writing style of your blog with your company website. Be more approachable and relaxed when writing for the blog.
• Underetake SEO on your blog in the same way as you would your company website
• Optimise your title tag and add additional SEO by including meta description and keyword tagging
• Consider a professional design for your blog
• Make sure your blog and all its content is accessibile and its structure is user-friendly
• Include an ABOUT US page explaining who you are and any mission statement or aims of the blog

A corporate or company blog is an excellent way to increase website traffic. increase potential customers and an exciting way to promote your company news. products and services.

Buzzin’ Fly offer a Blog Management service. Contact Buzzin’ Fly on +44 (0)1634 322 721 if you would like to know more about this service.