I’m really getting into the marketing, I mean holiday season this year. Like some people like to see the decorations or Christmas tress go up,  I like seeing all the holiday social media marketing campaigns.

I’m a fan of gift guides and SmartBrief, one of my favorite social media email newsletters, has examples of many gift guides including their own. You could get inspired to create one of your own or find gifts for your friends.

AllFacebook has a post with great ideas for holiday posts (be they blog posts, wall posts, tweets or even the basis of social media campaigns).

I must end with gifts. It’s not from me, but I’m telling you about it. Get 30 mins. of free wifi on Delta flights that have wifi capability from December 12 through January 2. Here’s the press release. I’m going to Vegas, hopefully we get lucky.

If you’re looking for some holiday music, check out this indie Christmas music from Deer Child. I have it playing as I write this. When it comes to nostalgia and connecting with your fans a little music could help create the right mood. These are religious because I am but snag a local indie band to create something for the background in your video or as a gift to your fans.

I’ve always said that when it comes to marketing the internet is an open book – and it’s even searchable. Since it’s almost Christmas most retailers are running holiday campaigns with social media.

Learn from watching what others do and then modify their ideas to fit your needs. Note the landing pages, the rules, design, and apps they use. Look at how they titled the contest. Try out contests just to see how easy (or not) they are to enter and share with others.

Here a few ideas to get you started.

1. Run a Holiday Themed Facebook Photo Contest
This is a classic Facebook contest idea (see the article I wrote for American Express OPEN forum for more ideas). Gap has the “12 Days of Joy” c0ntest. Fans are asked to “Submit a photo of your most fun, cool, sweet, or in any way interesting holiday tradition.” They will pick 12 winners to will get $500 Gap gift cards. They use OfferPop to run their campaign.

2. Start a Movement with a Cause-Related Social Campaign
MoveOn is queen of cause-related email marketing. I love their new campaign for Christmas called, “Love Makes a Family.”  If you know me you know it doesn’t matter if you like the industry or agree with the politics – you can still learn from them.

4. Ask your Fans to Make a Christmas Wish List (with your products)
I like this campaign because it is sure to boost sales. If you’re going to the trouble of making a list of what you want to buy, you may as well go ahead and click “checkout.” Amazon should do something like this for their wish lists (mine is pretty long if you are wondering what to get me for Christmas this year!).

You could also make that wish list into a competition and you could win your wish list. L’Occitane en Provence: “Wish List Competition” http://on.fb.me/uSPQkB (OfferPop powered)

5. Start a Gift Guide or Recommendation List
You can go basic just by publishing a PDF file or web site full of gift ideas, or you can go fancy. The grandmama of them all is Etsy’s Gift Ideas for Facebook Friends.  It culls through your Facebook friends, looks at their profiles and makes recommendations of homemade gifts you could buy for them based on their tastes. Brilliant!

6. Twelve or 25 Days of Christmas Promotions
Talbots is doing a 12 Days of Christmas sweepstakes. Each day there’s a new product they are giving  away and you get extra entries for fans. Great way to subtly suggest products for their customers to buy with a nice picture of the day’s product on their Facebook landing page. They also use OfferPop’s referral app.

7. A B2B Christmas

It may seem easier to promote consumer products, but you can get into the holidays even if you’re B2B. Red Rock Media did a great job on this with their 12 tips of Christmas. Each day is a new tip on their blog. Anyone could do this. I could give 12 tips of a PR Christmas. If you are a design firm you could do 12 days of Christmas designs and showcase your past work (and promote people to order cards from you – this combined with SEO could really help you out every Christmas).

My Gift to You
Alright, your turn. Any ideas or examples you’ve seen of excellent holiday social media marketing? This is your chance to share (and promote your good work or business too). As my gift to you, if your example is good I’ll tweet it to over 9,000 people on Twitter. Just leave a prewriten tweet with a bit.ly in your comment that I can use or edit.

Mark Cuban is an Internet billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. He has a new book out. It’s short at just under 100 pages and it’s cheap too, at $2.51. He hopes to sell a billion copies (he seems to think in billions). Imagine if he does sell a billion copies. I’m looking for the current numbers, and don’t know what Amazon keeps but even if he gets $1 a book, that’s one hell of a profit (over $1.5 billion).

You’ve heard of blog to book deals. The newest rendition of this is blog to ebook.  And you won’t need a book deal or publisher. All you need is some big success and a lot of friends. Cuban has over 330k friends on Facebook and 760k followers on Twitter.

The book is basically a compilation of Cuban’s blog posts you can read free on his blog. But that hasn’t stopped it from becoming an instant bestseller. It’s titled: “How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It.” I like this interview with Mark Cuban about his book and life.

I love this line, it just strikes me as so amazing: Of all your business ventures, the profit margin for this book is unmatched. Much of the book already had appeared as blog posts, and the production, promotion and distribution costs were negligible.

I love to use Twitter to find great headlines. Here’s a few about this story:

The Book World Is Changing: Mark Cuban Creates A Best Seller Out Of Some Blog Posts

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban hopes for a slam dunk with his new e-book

I’m buying it to see how it differs (in format) from his blog and to read it in one concise place on my Kindle. But really I’m reading it to see what all the hoopla is about. And to learn.

Check out

Mark Cuban’s book on Amazon

In related news, the Justice Department is looking into if Apple is keeping prices for ebooks artificially high.

My business partner Ponn Sabra and I have known each other for several years. We are enthusiasts of online press releases to promote businesses.

We recently launched a new venture called Publicity Spark. We want to help small businesses get the spark of PR and social media for more traffic, search engine rankings and sales. Most of our products are downloadable guides because print books about this topic go out of date quickly!

We just started a 6-week blogging tour.  That simply means we will be guest blogging on a different blog each week for 6 weeks. We share tips from our ebooks and we’re giving out prizes.

How to Win

Each comment you make will give you another entry into that week’s prize drawings, the grand prize drawing AND will help your search engine optimization. There are many ways to enter each week, from answering the questions we post, to following Publicity Spark and our gracious hosts on Twitter, etc. Check out the contest posts on each blog for more info.

Tour Schedule

Here is the schedule of blogs we will be stopping at each week, make sure to follow along and comment on our posts for a chance to win free prizes!

August 1-5th: Kelly McCausey’s Solopreneur Expertise at SoloSmarts

August 8-12th: WorkingWahm: By Christina Lemmey

August 15-19th: Lesa Dale, Teen Biz Coach

August 22-26th: Social Marketing For Small Businesses at SocialBuzzClub

August 29-Sept 2: Small Business Expert Denise O’Berry’s Blog

September 5-9th: Glennette Goodbread at PremiumWebDesign

Thanks to the bloggers who have participated, we are honored.  If you would like to be a part of our future tours feel free to contact us as we will be planning another blog tour program soon!

Should you or shouldn’t you put your unborn child on Facebook? This is the question for many soon-to-be-new-parents.

Facebook recently added an expectant parent option to your profile page.

If you ask a social media nerd like me I’d say Yes, OF COURSE you should add your baby to Facebook. But a lot of people say NO WAY.

But if you’re already listing your relationship status, your job, your relatives, your every thought on Facebook, then why not announce that you’re pregnant there too? Besides, we’re already doing it.

You still have to be 14 to have a profile and Facebook has deleted people who break this rule.

You can also put up a picture of the ultrasound.  However, that doesn’t mean that your baby can have their own profile and amass a bunch of friends both born and unborn. As far as I can tell, it’s just an acknowledgment. A formal step that was already happening informally.

When you add your baby, they’ll show up underneath your list of friends on the left sidebar. You can add all your kids with their birthdays (I didn’t include that info).

To add your baby, click on “edit” at the top of your profile and find the “family and friends” tab.

Privacy & other concerns
The biggest concern I’ve seen is people wondering what happens if you have a miscarriage (I’ve had a couple myself and the 1st time I had started to tell people, it was awkward sometimes but then it was sweet how people reacted). Also, it seems like Facebook takes what we say about ourselves & uses it to make money. Remember they’re a business and businesses exist to make money or they go out of business and we have no way to brag publicity connect with our friends or customers. Then there are privacy issues (you can control who sees what, to an extent).

No such thing as TMI on Facebook?
Remember, you decide when to put up the news and you take the risks. Believe me, I have thought about what to post if something were to go wrong. But that’s part of life, a life I’ve chosen to share with my network (and why I don’t often include professional contacts unless we’re also friends).

It does get a little dicey sometimes, but life is dicey. Besides if I were to lose the baby after I thought it was safe to post I would appreciate the support of my friends and family. A lot more people will comment than actually call you and it is comforting to get sympathy when you need it. Who wants to call or bring the sad topic up to dozens of people? Not me. I plan to tell most people when she’s actually born by you guessed it, posting it on Facebook.

Competitiveness
I hope that there’s never a time when your baby can have a profile and friend count of their own. It’s already tough to keep the jealousy at bay.  Now the popularity contest could start before you’re even born. Who has more friends? Who got the best gifts/baby shower? Are your ultrasound photos ultra hip? It can get out of hand.

Already some of my Facebook friends who seem to live a charmed existence can get on my nerves. I’d rather not be inundated with their charmed children’s lives too. That’s what mom blogs are for!

Get your unborn child on Twitter instead
If you’re squeamish about putting your unborn baby on Facebook, there’s always Twitter. Who can forget Penelope Trunk’s tweet about her miscarriage that made national news? And did you know Lance Armstrong has a Twitter account for his baby @cincoarmstrong? It’s no longer updated, but who has time and what’s the point?

Yes, you could spend your entire life tweeting or Facebooking for you, your business, your children (born and expecting) and impersonating people you admire if you want to.

The new marketing frontier — marketing to expectant parents on Facebook
As a marketer I can’t help but go here. If Facebook knows that you’re pregnant and when you’re due they can do a lot with that info. Businesses that sell baby portraits, diaper services, hospitals, and others can run ads targeted to new moms. Happens offline all the time. If I were Baby Center (who claimed at Evo that 70% of expectant moms get their newsletter!) I’d be all over this. I’m sure you can already create baby registries, now you need to link them to your baby.

I predict in the next few years we’ll be able to send our ultrasound pictures directly from the doctor’s office to email or to our Facebook page. Instead of living life for the sake of life, we could just live it to look good on Facebook.

My take
We already put up YouTube videos of us telling our families the news of a baby on the way. We are thinking about taking the perfect photo to post before or after birth – even before the baby is cleaned up. There are pictures of our dating, marriage, divorce, pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and all sorts of details that were once private. No one is forcing this either, we’re choosing to do it (or not).

Facebook is just evolving with their customers, just like any savvy business should.

So now I have to ask. Have you or would you put your unborn child on Facebook?

I recently heard Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz talk about how social influences search. He also recently wrote about how Twitter influences rankings.

Here are 7 Social SEO Tips from SEOMoz:

1. Infographics are still effective for SEO (look at this score for a web site called “Medical Coding and Billing” on Mashable). Develop your own powerful network for sharing them (or let an influencers put it on their blog. They get the social and you get the link juice). Use the tineye plugin to see who has published your infographic. Make a list. Grease the wheels by thanking those people, connecting with them, letting them know about new content they might be interested in/share with others. I also recommend that you check out the Social Buzz Club.
2. Google draws from Quora, Facebook (indirectly), LinkedIn, Yahoo 360, Twitter and other social networks to rank your influence. So being active on these sites could benefit you.
3. Find influencers in your industry by using FollwerWonk (Twitter) which sorts by # of followers, search Google profiles (sorted by author authority), LinkedIn (search by region or topic and look at # of connections). These are the people you should build relationships with and hope will share your content.
4. Develop a user-generated content strategy. Here’s a great example – Sugarrae interviews experts in link building. She asks everyone in her network for the questions and then poses those questions for experts to answer. Could you find and interview experts in your niche? Start by asking what people really want to know, then provide the answers.
5. Use bit.ly and WhentoTweet to fine see what content works for your audience and when to tweet it. You can find the best content in your niche, re-write the headlines and add a link.
6. For Facebook, send a photographer to your events and tag everyone who was there on Facebook. They have to “like” your page to comment on the photo.
7. What about videos influence on SEO? After all, Google owns YouTube. Rand asserts that video doesn’t influence rankings but it’s a good idea to embed video on your site and use the video sitemap for Google indexing. Videos can be great for traffic. They often get more clicks than regular search results, even if they are further down on the list.

Have you tried any of these tactics and found them to have an impact on your rankings?

Depending on Facebook for a living can be frustrating.

One of the most frustrating parts of being a social media consultant is keeping up with changes on Facebook and other social platforms I depend on. For example, you plan and build out a Facebook contest for weeks and hours. Buy-in finally reached. Ready to launch. In this case, the contest success depends on a landing page/app that collects hundreds of entries and contact information for each.

Without an app you could spend hours pouring over your Wall to find and track entries manually. You depend on using an app because it’s against Facebook’s rules to require your fans to post to your Wall to enter a contest. It’s also very cumbersome to choose a winner that way.

The developer of the app depends on the Facebook platform. When I heard Mark Zuckerberg speak I loved how he takes pride in the fact that Facebook helps entrepreneurs like himself start new businesses. Here’s the problem though – those businesses are subject to any changes Facebook makes and often without notice. And Facebook changes often making your advice, webinars, eBooks, blog posts, and conference talks obsolete. Or their changes require expensive staff time to program new solutions or fixes for your products.

Constant change is part of the cost of doing business in new media and part of what makes it exciting, but sometimes it’s a lot for a new business to keep up with. However, not innovating (changing) means being obsolete (ask MySpace).

Imagine having several large clients depending on your app and having something change that makes the app unworkable. Or Facebook shuts down your app without notice because of an issue with your server (or something else). No warning and suddenly you need to revamp your code. This is not good for business. Clients may not be too understanding when all their plans are suddenly on hold while you scramble to revamp your product.

Technology can be frustrating when you depend on it to work a certain way and it either changes or does not work as planned.

Last night at a blogger’s conference I had a discussion with a professor about if it’s possible to even be a “social media expert” when social media is so big and always in flux.

Who should take the blame when things don’t go as planned – even if it’s something you didn’t anticipate or cannot control?

Can social media experts afford to be arrogant or rest a minute on past success (past meaning, last week or month)?

Sometimes I’m swept up in it all. I love this entire revolution. But many times I find myself being defensive or seemingly arrogant because as social media consultants our opinions can constantly be challenged. There is a lot of education that goes with the job and as I pointed out, it’s not always a quick or inexpensive solution (in time or money).

Add on to that high expectations of quick success or an illusion of ease (that it doesn’t take a lot of mental energy, developing and testing to find the right mix of products and solutions for a client). Or that it’s simple to get a huge influencer (or many small influencers) to take interest in and post about your brand.

No, social media is not a miracle drug or magic wand for marketers. It’s a moving target we’re all trying to hit. It’s exhilarating when you do hit (much like the jackpot my husband hit last month) right. But it can really hurt when you don’t.

It’s dubbed the “Battle of the Bulge,” and it’s the biggest PR disaster I’ve ever seen on Twitter.

I have to be careful how I write about this that Google doesn’t mark me as having adult content (already been through that, took a few years to recover). Simply put, a suggestive photo was tweeted from Mr. Weiner’s Twitter account to a young woman. Weiner is used to jokes because of his last name. Now we all get in on it. Thank you for the laughs Congressman Weiner. But the longer this goes on without a better resolution, it’s making me squirm instead of laugh.

The guy is also very comfortable in the spotlight and usually loves media coverage but it’s not the same when you’re in trouble. He’s dodging questions, looking shifty, and it’s becoming pathetic.  Now if we could counterbalance his theatrics with House Speaker John Boehner who cries all the time, you’d keep us all entertained forever.

This scandal is instructive for any brand (people are brands too) in social media. There are risks to stepping into the public eye and there are risks to staying out of it.

Shelly Palmer covered the story brilliantly from a social media PR perspective. One challenge of Twitter is it’s a medium most of us aren’t used to. Before Twitter we weren’t all able to broadcast information so quickly to so many, so easily.

“Twitter allows us to engage in two relatively new forms of communication: many-to-one and many-to-many. I say relatively new because the tools have only been available for a little over five years. It is important to note that, unlike one-to-one (conversation) or one-to-many (broadcasting) which humans are physiologically equipped to monitor, many-to-one (tweets) and many-to-many (retweets) require digital tools to monitor. Not to put too fine a point on it, human beings have been doing one-to-one communication for over 140,000 years, and have been doing formalized one-to-many communication since the invention of the Greek Proscenium (about 3,500 years).”

Twitter Lacks Security
Twitter has a flaw – they seem to ignore that more than one person might be tweeting from an account. The only way you can accommodate that is to give out your account username and passoword. This drives me crazy. I wish Twitter would make it easier for people (not just one person) to manage their brands. Facebook does. Twitter could add a dropdown of all your accounts to choose from (like Facebook), or let you check which accounts you want the tweet to go out on (like Hootsuite).

The way Twitter works, it’s easy to see how your password could get out. Someone could tweet from your account and could get you in trouble fast. Every tweet is saved and stamped with a time, date and sometimes even your location. As Shelley points out: “There is absolutely nothing private about Twitter. Nothing.” Twitter doesn’t just pose problems for individuals, it can interfere with the security of nations – like when Bin Laden’s neighbor accidentally live tweeted the US operation to kill Bin Laden.

It’s very likely that as he claims, someone breached his Twitter account to send the tweet without his permission. The picture is so generic it really could be just about any man’s and if I were him, that’s what I’d say. The picture was not of me. I didn’t send it. End of story. But his cagey responses make him look guilty. We’re all waiting for the rest of the story.

Sometimes I want an option to hold all tweets in queue so you could make sure you meant to send something before it goes live. I have wished I could retract a tweet (have you?). But that would also take away from the immediacy of Twitter.

People Forget Fast, Come Clean and Move On
What now? Ask any social media expert and they’d say being transparent is the best solution. It’s time to come clean on the whole story. It couldn’t possibly be more embarrassing than it already is. People know other people, even famous people, do dumb things. They usually forgive you.

The longer he waits to give the full story, the worse he looks.

It’s time to bare all Rep. W!

Update: Weiner has admitted to sending this and other photos of himself from his Twitter account (what an idiot) but says he’s not resigning. Since he used the phone paid for by the government for sexting and sending photos, there will be an investigation. But for the tech savvy his worst offense may just be the revelation…

There has been so much spam on Facebook lately

It may be a post on your Wall from a friend you know that says something like:

“haha you gotta see this…” [link]

Or it will be an IM from a friend with a message and link that sounds urgent or sensational. Like the one my friend sent that claimed to have Bin Laden video. It just didn’t sound like him, so I Imed back asking, did you mean to send this to me. He said no. It was spam. Always respond and verify before you click if you have doubts.

If you get links on your Wall that seem suspicious, go to their profile and see if in “recent activity” it shows they have been posting a link on many people’s Walls. Click to see if it’s the same message (but don’t click on the spam link or you’ll pass it to your friends next!). Send your friend a message alerting them so they can stop the cycle. Here’s how:

PRSarahEvans writes:
If your account has been taken over and used to send spam, you should follow these steps immediately:

• Reset your Facebook password. You can do this by clicking the “Forgot your password?” link on the login page or by going to the Account Settings page once logged in.
• If you can’t reset your password because the email address you use to log in has changed, or if your account has been disabled, visit our help page.
• Make sure you have up-to-date security software on your computer, run a scan, and remove any malicious files. If you don’t do this, and your computer is infected, your account may be taken over again. If you don’t yet have protection for your computer, you can download a complimentary six-month subscription of McAfee security software. Learn more on the Software tab.

You can find even more information on how to stay safe on the Threats and Tips tabs as well as in Facebook’s Help Center.

Google has free security software that you can install and run.

If you get this or a virus of any kind, you may need to go back to a previous version of your computer and do “system restore” which is not difficult but is different depending on your operating system. Just use Google to learn how for your computer (i.e. “system restore for Windows 7″).  You will lose any new installs you did since that date, but you’ll also lose the virus. Then change the password to your computer.

I did a system restore when I had an email scam that I couldn’t get rid of on Gmail. It emailed a bunch of my friends with just a link. They clicked, they got it. I finally got rid of it. I hope the same for you!

Sometimes I wish I weren’t so passionate about social media.

But I am.

There are some pet peeves I have.

I need to memorize these lines from this handy social media cheat sheet (This is a must read. I love visually rich cheat sheets like this). It expresses a concept about sensitivities that different online communities and personalities often have which you should know about before trying to work with them.

“Attempting to build your brand on Reddit is like trying to sell whale meat to Greenpeace. It won’t happen, and it’s likely to turn very ugly if you try.”

So what I’m saying is: Don’t anger the natives.

How do you anger the natives? You try to push your products on them. Selling is an advertising rather than a networking mentality. It’s social NETWORKING not social ADVERTISING. Advertising is usually not in the least bit social. How do you feel about someone you have never talked to walk up to you and try to sell you something? Unless it’s the Sahara, you’re thirsty and they’re selling water, it will turn them off instantly.

The next thing every small business should read is an article in Mashable called, Social Media for Small Businesses: 6 Effective Strategies

It makes a few points I want to broadcast to small businesses and PR firms everywhere. And I want my message to quickly reach millions of people who don’t know me and I have never talked to before.

Social Media Doesn’t Equal Self-Promotion (focus on your customers, not your company).

and

Don’t Measure Success by Follower Counts

“Starbucks has more than 1.3 million followers on Twitter. You probably don’t, and that’s OK. As a small business, you shouldn’t get caught up in the numbers game or try to keep up with the big brands…it’s more important to have a devoted, enthusiastic community. Be patient. It’s organic growth that matters. Things don’t (and won’t) happen overnight.“

These are the messages I want to get across. If you start out a conversation about social media with me using terms such as you want to penetrate the blogosphere, dominate your market, and get thousands of Twitter followers or Facebook fans I will cringe. And then a part of me will die inside.