Much like karma, social media success is strongly correlated with a series of seemingly disconnected events. Whether you realize it or not; every tweet, wall post, e-mail, or comment you make builds up your presence on the web. Networking has been the bottom line of business for years, and now the way you socially network through the media will affect your business. Here is how to make your social media karma positive:

1. Be real. This is the first and foremost principle of furthering your social media karma that I could think of.  Being real involves not lying, being transparent about who you are and what you believe, and sharing an honest voice.  People trust others that have an authentic voice, and are more likely to refer them to others or help when asked.
2. Respond to emails. This is tough when you have a high volume of unsolicited emails, but the idea that someone took time to write directly to you should make it enough of a priority to respond.  Obviously, this applies to personally written messages, and not to email blasts of press releases.  Those are rarely worth a response.
3. Offer exclusives. Maybe you aren’t breaking “news” online, but the idea of exclusives is not limited to that.  If you are going to write about or post something interesting, whether related to your business or not, offer a preview to others in your network.  Share ideas as they happen and offer the chance for others to say it first.  Exclusives are gold in the blogosphere … everyone wants them.
4. Make connections. In social settings, the gold standard for making connections is introducing two people to one another who later get married.  Social media is no different.  If you can be the person making these connections between individuals that may not have met otherwise, you will be remembered by both for your efforts.
5. Join networks. This is not just about publishing networks, but about social networks of people who are interested in the same things you are.  Joining groups like this, and actively participating adds value to the group.  As a member, it probably won’t be long before you take something useful from the group – and hopefully add something useful as well.
6. Avoid snark. Snarkiness is the enemy of good karma.  Being rude, uselessly opinionated or arrogant are all rising behaviours from people in social media that add to the sea of needless commentary online.  The price for this may not be apparent, as unfortunately, snarkiness does sometimes result in conversation sometimes (who can’t avoid watching a car crash?) — but eventually the snark will catch up to you.
7. Forgive mistakes. Most bloggers or others in social media are not journalists and don’t have the time or necessity for checking every fact or argument before making it.  This does result in mistakes, and people do screw up.  Correcting them without holding a grudge is a big deal.  Mistakes are made, people are sorry.  If they fixed the error, then get over it.
8. Post to contact. Email is not the only way to get in touch with someone.  Posting about something they have written and linking to their blog offers an indirect route to contact, as most bloggers pay attention to who is linking to them.  Writing about one of my posts is still the best way to get onto my radar, and I suspect most bloggers are the same way.  Communicating in this way avoids the email filter and starts the dialogue.
9. Comment and participate. This may be part of earlier suggestions, however the idea that you need to be a participant online rather than just an observer is key to this belief.  If you expect others to communicate and add comments to your blog, you need to be online doing the same for others.  Without participation, it is difficult to belong to a community online or build relationships with others.
10. Show gratitude. Often mentioned as an important factor in connecting with users, showing gratitude for someone interacting with some content you have posted or a comment you have shared, linking to you, or offering some other effort on your behalf is vital.  Appreciation makes someone more likely to believe that you think their efforts are significant and as a result, connect more strongly with you and your blog.

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Social media has taken the world by storm. Right now, it is rare to find someone who has not joined at least one form of social media and even more rare to find people uninformed of the uproar.

The business world is highly impacted by this new change and has reinvented their customer outreach strategies to comply. Social media has become an interactive community that is arguably the best form of communication between business and consumer.

The first step to effectively use social media for your business is to understand the classifications of each respective outlet. Robert Howard, the CTO/Founder of Telligent (an enterprise collaboration software company), explains each community in depth;

• Direct Community: These are communities owned and managed by a company typically running proprietary community and enterprise collaboration software solutions. Examples include the National Breast Cancer Foundation’s community website, Starbucks’ blog, or Dell’s support community. The organization is responsible for running and managing the community and benefits from rich data and user profiles created within that community. These also would include private B2B and internal employee-targeted communities.
• Managed Community: These are communities started and managed by the organization, but run on consumer-facing social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Examples here include the National Breast Cancer Foundation’s Facebook Page, Starbucks’ Flickr group pool, or Dell’s presence on Twitter. The organization is responsible for running and managing the community, but does not necessarily benefit from the rich data and user profiles created within the community. Typically, the facilitator of the community (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) benefits the most from the underlying data.
• Participating Community: These are communities started and managed by individuals or groups of users, typically on consumer-facing social networking sites, but sometimes also with proprietary software. An example here would be a fan site for Microsoft’s Xbox or an independent Porsche enthusiast group. Typically the organization whose products or services are the topic of discussion can participate, but has no authority or access to the data created within the community.

Howard suggests the best strategies to control each individual community with the goals of increasing awareness, increasing revenue, and decreasing expenses.

• What is your objective? If you are running a digital marketing campaign, your strategy is different than if you are running a support solution. The difference in strategy is important for defining what the end goal is and how to use the various tools and technologies to support that strategy. For example, with a digital marketing strategy, you likely care more about authenticity and awareness than question/answer rates. It’s important to clearly understand your objective, because it helps define the technologies used to support it, the measurements to track the objective, and what role social media plays in the strategy.
• Who is your audience? If you are trying to reach a new or existing audience, your choice of solutions (direct, managed, or participating community) may vary. In a network strategy, you likely care about the relationships between the members of your communities. In this case, creating both direct and managed communities may be a good solution. The National Breast Cancer Foundation links its managed community (Facebook) to its direct community, for example.

• What are you measuring? What most savvy organizations have figured out about community and collaboration technologies is that they provide an abundance of data –- whether it is to feed a CRM system, mine for customer ideas and suggestions, or identify influential users. The real value is the deep insight and analysis that can be gained from the veritable goldmine of customer data found within your community. While some of this mining can be done on consumer networks, it doesn’t compare to the level of analysis that you can do within your own community.

Read the full article here.

Wish you had a crystal ball to predict the constantly changing future of Social Media?

Here are 11 Predictions of how Marketers will be doing their business in 2012:

• Privacy expectations will (have to) change
• Complete decentralization of social networks
• Our interaction with search engines will be different
• Rise of the content aggregators
• Social media augmented reality
• Influencer marketing will be redefined
• Ratings everywhere
• Social media agents
• Riding the (Google) wave
• Thinking beyond “nowness”
• Social media everything and the return of digital media

Check out the explanations of these 11 predictions by Freddie Laker of Sapient.

Both paid search and social media are important components of increasing the presence of your business. However, incorporating the two can be the most beneficial way to get word out on your business.

The first step is to realize that paid search and social media assist your business in completely separate ways. Focus on the strengths of each; use social media for developing relationships with consumers and determine their specific wants and needs. With that information, it is easier to determine the method of paid search to use that will be most beneficial and worth your money.

It has been proven that social media helps promote paid search and its effect on consumers in these three ways:

1. Target audiences are more likely to search
2. Target audiences are more likely to click
3. Because of higher clickthrough rates, ads are placed higher on page

Read on to learn Smart Strategies for incorporating social media and paid search.

By now we know that there are many options in using Social Media. Based on research analyzing social media users interests, each site has a distinctive assortment of tastes. Twitter provides mostly news, MySpace is for entertainment, Facebook mixes news and personal connections, and Digg is a combination of all types of interests.

This chart separates each particular use of Social Media outlets, and the results are surprising…

Read the full article here.