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.

The bloggers in Utah are a close community. We have a secret Facebook Page with over 300 members (you should too) to communicate and share information with each other. I’ve both hosted and attended several events. Recently I participated in a blog tour of The Shoppes at Riverwoods – an outdoor mall in Provo, Utah.

We stopped at a toy store, an ice cream shop, a gift store and a restaurant. We get to meet the owners of each and learn more about local businesses. You can forget that each shop was started by someone who is passionate about their business.

Good bloggers are also good storytellers who can tell people about you through pictures and words. Blog posts usually rank well in search engines meaning that people who search for your business may read a first hand account about the business from a blog post.

Unfortunately, a lot of bloggers don’t use keywords in their blog post titles or links (even if you ask them to).  If you search “Utah toy store” my blog post is the 3rd result in Google. I guarantee that my neighborhood blog does not get the most traffic or have a devoted following, but anytime someone wants to find a toy store in Utah, they could find my post and decide to go to Blinkenstaff’s (which I highly recommend doing).

Unless you’re a blog with a huge following you probably won’t see an immediate affect on sales or even traffic from getting a lot of blog posts written about your product. To me it’s really about the search benefit and of course the word of mouth. Many have strong Facebook followings and are posting to Facebook, Twitter and maybe even checking in on Facebook or Foursquare.

Another benefit is that the bloggers themselves often become loyal customers. I know I plan to head back to Blinkenstaff’s to do some Christmas shopping.

My favorite blogging event is hosting or attending restaurant tastings, but we’ve also attended movie openings. Bloggers love to get to know and network with other bloggers. In the best case, it’s a win for everyone. Have you hosted a blogger event or would you like to? How did it go? Tell me about it in the comments.

This past week I went back to work after maternity leave. I’m starting off with just one day a week, going to two days in a few months. While it was a little difficult thinking of leaving my 2 month old baby for an entire day, I also realized it was time. I needed to get back to work again to save my own sanity and Alexis is getting some great bonding time with grandma.

I realized years ago that I don’t do well making friends with other moms. Much like at work, just having one close friend at work makes a huge difference in your happiness. I haven’t found that friend at home and I’m going nuts. I’m social and hate being alone most of the day. Which is why I go into work at least once a week now.

When I left I trained someone to do my job. She did so well I didn’t even worry about things while I was gone. That was such a relief. When I returned I realized a few things:

1- My temporary replacement was better at doing my job than I was.

2- I don’t think she had another job lined up.

3- The plan I had wasn’t going to work as I’d hoped.

Things had also changed dramatically in the company since I left. I have a new boss and team. With all of the changes I haven’t gotten updates and some of tasks I did have been assigned to others. At first I panicked. It’s not uncommon for someone to take your place while you’re on maternity leave. I could’ve been angry or threatened and demanded or fought to get my position back. Instead I saw it as an opportunity to be creative (one of my strengths).

It’s not unusual for a woman to get passed over for a promotion or lose a position because she takes maternity leave. Look what happened over at TechCrunch.

My solution? I’m creating a premium version of the product I started (a blog network). I still get to work with bloggers but now I’m just working with the best. The group will be much smaller but that will free me up to be partners with them and develop more creative solutions for our clients. I get to pass off some of the parts I didn’t like about my job to my replacement. She’ll have more work and I will too. I see it as a win.

Why am I blogging about this? I want other women in the workforce to consider these issues. I also want to show that when you feel threatened you can fight the change or you can make a change. Usually there are solutions you don’t see at first. Look for them. Most of all I want women to stand up for themselves and to think ahead and plan — something that took me years to learn.

I’m a little late to post this story but I have a good excuse.  I’m now mom to a sweet baby girl named Alexis who was born over Labor Day weekend. That’s why I haven’t been tweeting, responding quickly to emails or writing many press releases lately.

This post is about another baby though.

Last week the country marked 10 years since the attacks on America on September 11th.

For me, the best antidote to the sadness and losses of this awful day came from being with people in my community. I was a community organizer (just like Obama!) and had a police picnic planned in the neighborhood I worked in. We had a potluck dinner and invited an officer to talk about neighborhood safety, drugs and crime. It was so healing to be together even though I didn’t know a lot of the people who attended.

Meetup is a web site that lets you find and meet people in your community who share your interests. Because of this web site I’ve been on hikes, gotten business advice, and looked for moms to hang out with. It gives you hope that there are good people who are talented and smart that you might otherwise never know in real life.

Speaking of babies, did you know that Meetup was a 9/11 baby? Co-founder Scott Heiferman wrote an email about its beginnings from Meetup headquarters in New York.

He said:

“Let me tell you the Meetup story. I was living a couple miles
from the Twin Towers, and I was the kind of person who thought
local community doesn’t matter much if we’ve got the internet
and tv. The only time I thought about my neighbors was when I
hoped they wouldn’t bother me.

When the towers fell, I found myself talking to more neighbors
in the days after 9/11 than ever before. People said hello to
neighbors (next-door and across the city) who they’d normally
ignore. People were looking after each other, helping each
other, and meeting up with each other. You know, being
neighborly.

A lot of people were thinking that maybe 9/11 could bring
people together in a lasting way. So the idea for Meetup was
born: Could we use the internet to get off the internet — and
grow local communities?

We didn’t know if it would work. Most people thought it was a
crazy idea — especially because terrorism is designed to make
people distrust one another.

A small team came together, and we launched Meetup 9 months
after 9/11.

Every Meetup starts with people simply saying hello to
neighbors. And what often happens next is still amazing to me.
They grow businesses and bands together, they teach and
motivate each other, they babysit each other’s kids and find
other ways to work together. They have fun and find solace
together. They make friends and form powerful community. It’s
powerful stuff.”

Today, there are over 10 million Meetuppers and over 100,000 Meetup Groups.

What a success story!

It’s inspiring to see how tragedy can motivate people to do extraordinary things. What other businesses and nonprofits got a start because of 9/11? If you have an example, please share your story in the comments.

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?

You have to love it when one of the best SEO firms in the world shows up and gives you a compliment like that!

When SEOMoz made their first Mozcation stop in Salt Lake City, they brought good food, free t-shirts and some kick-a#!@ presentations. I’ve been to a lot of conferences and heard a lot of people talk about SEO. It’s usually a rehash of the same old. Not this. I was trying to listen, write and tweet the insights, but it was tough to keep up.

The place was packed with SEOMoz groupies. Rand said they couldn’t have hoped for a better turnout if they held this event in Seattle. For me it was like a reunion – I saw Twitter friends I’ve never met in real life, friends from the industry I haven’t seen for a while, and met new friends. I love this industry. They are still very open. Rand and his team were stars, he talked to just about everyone in the room and was totally down with us snapping pictures with him.

Rand spoke about the value of social to SEO. Search is intent-driven – people search for specific information. Social wasn’t always important to SEO but that’s changed. Now search engines started to take cues from social to influence search results. Even though they’ve denied it Google is tapping into social networks to determine how to rank web sites.

Having a large, most powerful network helps you more than ever. Tweets can be crawled almost instantly and can rank well, esp. if you are well-connected. Think of it Google Klout score – your authority matters. Rand gave a few examples of how well-received social campaigns can net higher rankings faster than traditional SEO.

“Social influences every other type of marketing.” – Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz

Perhaps the biggest impact is how most people are now getting personalized Google search results based on their interests and their networks. Content that has been shared by someone in your network will be listed higher than other content. So if you want people to see you on the front page, then  you need to care about social.

It goes something like this:

higher social influence/large social impact = higher search engines rankings

higher search engine rankings = more people find you & can mean higher leads/sales for your business

So if you’ve thought that social was a big waste of time and you just can’t be motivated to get into it, you’re missing the new frontier of SEO. If you want to be found online (even for small niches), social matters.

Here’s a question I’ve been considering: are mom bloggers sacrificing their readership to earn money – essentially turning their blogs into advertisements?

I’ve had a small taste of the euphoria bloggers feel when they are approached by ad agencies and brands. It’s validating. It’s a rite of passage. It shows you’re being taken seriously. You are a brand. People want to work with you. It’s flattering to be powerful.

On the other side I’ve seen the euphoria from brands who think they have a free or low-effort marketing channel in mom bloggers. They might flippantly underestimate the power or the effort it takes to woo this crowd. They may think they can get the bloggers to do the social media work while they reap most of the benefit.

As as blogger I get the work or just time that goes into even responding to inquiries and deciding where to put your attention. If you’re a mom blogger or a woman with children, life isn’t always predictable. The more you get into paid work the more you have to juggle, because there are higher expectations (some brands ask for the world).

Take Eden Fantasy’s which sells adult products/toys. I find it ironic that blogs that started out being about kids and parenting have very unfamily friendly content. I’m amazed at the penetration with their blogger outreach (learn from them even if you don’t affiliate with them).

Many mom blogs have an ad for this company in their sidebar embedded with a certain keyword phrase [I don't want to mention] and maybe even an endorsement/testimonial too. I checked and the company ranks #3 for that term. I think for most bloggers this is selling out. Their readers probably don’t want details of their sex life. Does it really work for your audience? This blogger doesn’t find the company ethical (something you should check out before engaging with any brand).

At a recent bloggers conference for Utah bloggers Tauni Everet brought up this topic. She pointed out how there is so much clutter in sidebars and so many sponsored posts that blogs are becoming more like ads. The value of the blog to readers and advertisers drop as more brands are becoming savvy to this. It’s beginning to hurting readership (what made them so popular in the first place).

I’m not saying you cannot successfully review products or represent brands and still be true to yourself. Some set up blogs for that purpose (giveaway/review blogs). I try to find that balance on my other blog and tell myself never just accept something because it’s “free.” Free has no value for things I don’t want. Free takes up my time and could turn off my readers won’t care about.

What do you think – have mom bloggers sold out or do are they just becoming more savvy businesswomen?

What I’m thinking of is – are there better ways to create mutual benefit? In my next post I’ll discuss creative solutions.